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ADVENTURES 
IN JOURNALISM 


By 

Philip Gibbs 

Author of 

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD,’* “MORE THAT 
MUST BE TOLD.” Etc. 




HARPER &. BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 


Copyright, 1923 
By Harper & Brothers 
Printed in the U.S.A. 

First Edition 

H-X 


©CIA7e0572 


QCT 27 1923 








Adventures in Journalism 

I 


T he adventure of journalism which has been mine— 
as editor, reporter, and war correspondent—is never 
a life of easy toil and seldom one of rich rewards. I 
would not recommend it to youth as a primrose path, nor 
to anyone who wishes to play for safety in possession of 
an assured income, regular hours, and happy home life. 

^ It is of uncertain tenure, because no man may hold on 
to his job if he weakens under the nervous strain, or 
quarrels on a point of honor with the proprietor who pays 
him or with the editor who sets his task. Even the most 
successful journalist—if he is on the writing side of a 
newspaper—can rarely bank on past achievements, how¬ 
ever long and brilliant, but must forever jerk his brain 
and keep his curiosity untired. 

As nobody, according to the proverb, has ever seen a 
dead donkey, so nobody has ever seen a retired reporter 
living on the proceeds of his past toil, like business men 
in other adventures of life. He must go on writing and 
recording, getting news until the pen drops from his hand, 
or the little bell tinkles for the last time on his typewriter, . 
and his head falls over an unfinished sentence. . . . Well, 

I hope that will happen to me, but some people look 
forward to an easier old age. 

I have known the humiliation of journalism, its inse¬ 
curity, its never-ending tax upon the mind and heart, its 

I 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 


squalor, its fever, its soul-destroying machinery for those 
who are not proof against its cruelties. Hundreds of 
times, as a young reporter, I was stretched to the last 
pull of nervous energy on some “story” which was wiped 
out for more important news. Often I went without food 
and sleep, suffered in health of body and mind, girded 
myself to audacities from which, as a timid soul, I shrank, 
in order to get a “scoop”—which failed. 

The young reporter has to steel his heart to these dis¬ 
appointments. He must not agonize too much if, after 
a day and night of intense and nervous effort, he finds 
no line of his work in the paper, or sees his choicest prose 
hacked and mangled by impatient subeditors, or his truth- ' 
telling twisted into falsity. 

He is the slave of the machine. Home life is not for 
him, as for other men. He may have taken unto himself 
a wife—poor girl I—but though she serves his little dinner 
all piping hot, he has to leave the love feast for the bleak 
streets, if the voice of the news editor calls down the 
telephone. 

So, at least, it was in my young days as a reporter on 
London newspapers, and many a time in those days I 

cursed the fate which had taken me to Fleet Street as a 
slave of the press. 

Several times I escaped; taking my courage in both 
hands—and it needed courage, remembering a wife and 
babe I broke with the spell of journalism and retired 
into quieter fields of literary life. 

But always I went back! The lure of the adventure 
was too strong. The thrill of chasing the new “story,” 
the interest of getting into the middle of life, sometimes 
behind the scenes of history, the excitement of recording 
sensational acts in the melodrama of reality, the meet¬ 
ings with heroes, rogues, and oddities, the front seats 
at the peep show of life, the comedy, the change, the 
comradeship, the rivalry, the test of one’s own quality of 

2 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

character and vision, drew me back to Fleet Street as a 
strong magnet. 

It was, after all, a great game I It is still one of the 
best games in the world for any young man with quick 
eyes, a sense of humor, some touch of quality in his use 
of words, and curiosity in his soul for the truth and 
pageant of our human drama, provided he keeps his soul 
unsullied from the dirt. 

Looking back on my career as a journalist, I know that 
I would not change for any other. Fleet Street, which I 
called in a novel The Street of Adventure, is still my 
home, and to its pavement my feet turn again from what¬ 
ever part of the world I return. 

When I first entered the street, twenty years ago alas I 
the social status of press men was much lower than at 
present, when the pendulum has swung the other way, 
so that newspaper proprietors wear coronets, the purlieus 
of Fleet Street are infested with barons and baronets, and 
even reporters have been knighted by the King. In my 
early days a journalist did not often get nearer to a 
Cabinet Minister than the hall porter of his office. It 
was partly his own fault, or at least, the fault of those 
who paid him miserably, because the old-time reporter— 
before Northcliffe, who was then Harmsworth, revised 
his salary and his status—was often an ill-dressed fellow, 
conscious of his own social inferiority, cringing in his man¬ 
ner to the great, and content to slink round to the back 
doors of life, rather than boldly assault the front-door 
kndcker. Having a good conceit of myself and a sensitive 
pride, I received many hard knocks and humiliations 
which, no doubt, were good for my soul. 

I resented the insolence of society women whom I was 
sent to interview. Even now I remember with humilia¬ 
tion a certain Duchess who demanded that, in return for 
a ticket to her theatrical entertainment, I should submit 
my “copy” to her before sending it to the paper. Weakly, 

3 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 


I agreed, for my annoyance was extreme when an Insolent 
footman demanded my article and carried It on a silver 
salver, at some distance from his liveried body, lest he 
should be contaminated by so vile a thing, to Her Grace 
and her fair daughters In an adjoining room. I heard 
them reading It, and their mocking laughter. ... I raged 
at the haughty arrogance of young government officials 
who treated me as “one of those damned fellows on the 
press.’’ I laughed bitterly and savagely at a certain 
Mayor of Bournemouth who revealed in one simple sen¬ 
tence (which he thought was kind) the attitude of public 
opinion toward the press which It despised—and feared. 

“You know,” he told me In a moment of candor, “I 
always treat journalists as though they were gentlemen.” 

For some time I disliked all mayors because of that 
confession, and a year or two later, when conditions were 
changing, I was able to take a joyous revenge from one 
of them, who was the Mayor of Limerick. He did not 
even treat journalists as though they were gentlemen. 
He treated them as though they were ruffians who ought 
to be thrust Into the outer darkness. 

King Edward was making a Royal Progress through 
Ireland—It was before the days of Sinn Fein—and, with 
a number of other correspondents, some of whom are 
now famous men. It was my duty to await and describe 
his arrival at Limerick and report his speech In answer 
to the address. 

Seeing us standing in a group, the Mayor demanded 
to know why we dared to stand on the platform where 
the King was about to arrive, when strict orders had been 
given that none but the Mayor and Corporation, and the 
Guard of Honor, were permitted on that space. “Get 
outside the station I” shouted the Mayor of Limerick, “or 
I’ll put my police on to ye I” 

Explanations were useless. Protests did not move the 
Mayor. To avoid an unpleasant scene, we retired out- 

4 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

side the station, indignantly. But I was resolved to get 
on that platform and defeat the Mayor at all costs. I 
noticed the appearance of an officer in cocked hat, plumes, 
and full uniform, whom I knew to be General Pole-Carew, 
commanding the troops in Ireland, and in charge of the 
royal journey. I accosted him boldly, told him the pain¬ 
ful situation of the correspondents who were there to 
describe the King’s tour and record his speeches. He 
was courteous and kind. Indeed, he did a wonderful and 
fearful thing. The Mayor and Corporation were already 
standing on a red carpet enclosed by brass railings, imme¬ 
diately opposite the halting place of the King’s train. 
General Pole-Carew gave the Mayor a tremendous dress¬ 
ing down which made him grow first purple and then pale, 
and ordered him, with his red-gowned satellites, to clear 
out of that space to the far end of the platform. General 
Pole-Carew then led the newspaper men to the red carpet 
enclosed by brass railings. It was to us that King Edward 
read out his reply to the address which was handed to him, 
while the Mayor and Corporation glowered sulkily. 

Unduly elated by this victory, perhaps, one of my col¬ 
leagues who had been a skipper on seagoing tramps before 
adopting the more hazardous profession of the press, 
resented, a few days later, being “cooped up” in the press 
box at Punchestown races which King Edward was to 
attend in semi-state. Nothing would content his soul but 
a place on the Royal Stand. I accompanied him to see 
the fun, but regretted my temerity when, without chal¬ 
lenge, we stood, surrounded by princes and peers of Ire¬ 
land, at the top of the gangway up which the King was 
to come. I think they put down my friend the skipper 
as the King’s private detective. He wore a blue reefer 
coat and a bowler hat with a curly brim. By good luck 
I was in a tall hat and morning suit, like the rest of the 
company. Presently the King came, in a little pageant 
of state carriages with outriders in scarlet and gold, and 

5 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

then, with his gentlemen, he ascended the gangway, shak¬ 
ing hands with all who were assembled on the stairs. 
The skipper, who was a great patriot, and loved King 
Edward as a “regular fellow,” betrayed himself by the 
warmth of his greeting. Grasping the King’s hand in a 
sailorman’s grip, he shook it long and ardently, and 
expressed the hope that His Majesty was quite well. 

King Edward was startled by this unconventional wel¬ 
come, and a few moments later, after some whispered 
words, one of his equerries touched the skipper on the 
shoulder and requested him politely to seek some other 
place. I basely abandoned my colleague, and betrayed no 
kind of acquaintance with him, but held to the advantage 
of my tall hat, and spent an interesting morning listening 
to King Edward’s conversation with the Irish gentry. 
Prince Arthur of Connaught was there, and I remember 
that King Edward clapped him on the back and chaffed 
him because he had not yet found a wife. “It’s time you 
got married, young fellow,” said his illustrious uncle. 

That memory brings me to the importance of clothes 
in the career of a journalist. It was Lord Northcliffe, 
then Alfred Harmsworth, who gave me good advice on 
the subject at the outset of my journalistic experience. 

“Always dress well,” he said, “and never spoil the 
picture by being in the wrong costume. I like the appear¬ 
ance of my young men to be a credit to the profession. 
It is very important.” 

That advice, excellent in its way, was sometimes diffi¬ 
cult to follow, owing to the rush and scurry of a reporter’s 
life. It is difficult to be correctly attired for a funeral in 
the morning and for a wedding in the afternoon, at least 
so far as the color of one’s tie. 

I remember being jerked off to a shipwreck on the 
Cornish coast in a tall hat and frock coat which startled 
the simple fishermen who were rescuing ladies on a life 
line. 


6 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

A colleague of mine who specialized in dramatic criti¬ 
cism was suddenly ordered to write a bright article about 
a garden party at Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately he 
had come down to the office that morning in a blue serge 
suit and straw hat, which is not the costume worn on such 
occasions. One of the King’s gentlemen, more concerned, 
I am sure, than the King, at this breach of etiquette, 
requested him to conceal himself behind a tree. 

The absence of evening dress clothes, owing to a hur¬ 
ried journey, has often been a cause of embarrassment 
to myself and others, with the risk of losing important 
news for lack of this livery. 

So it was when I was invited to attend a banquet given 
to Doctor Cook in Copenhagen, when he made his claim 
of having discovered the North Pole. For reasons which 
I shall tell later in these memories, it was of great impor¬ 
tance to me to be present at that dinner, where Doctor 
Cook was expected to tell the story of his amazing 
journey. But I had traveled across Europe with a razor 
and a toothbrush, and had no evening clothes. For a 
shilling translated into Danish money, I borrowed the 
dress suit of an obliging young waiter. He was a taller 
man than I, and the sleeves of his coat fell almost to my 
wrists, and the trousers bagged horribly below the knees. 
His waistcoat was also rather grease-stained by the acci¬ 
dents inevitable to his honorable avocation. In this attire 
I proceeded self-consciously to the Tivoli Palace where 
the banquet was held. I had to ascend a tall flight of 
marble steps, and, being late, I was alone and conspicuous. 

Feeling like Hop-o’-my-Thumb in the giant’s clothes, 
I pulled myself together, hitched up my waiter’s trousers, 
and advanced up the marble stairs. Suddenly I was aware 
of a fantastic happening. I found myself, as the fairy 
tales say, receiving a salute from a guard of honor. 
Swords flashed from their scabbards and my fevered 
vision was conscious of a double line of figures dressed 

7 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

in the scarlet coats and buckskin breeches of the English 
Life Guards. 

“This,” I said to myself, “is what comes tg a man who 
hires a waiter’s clothes. I have undoubtedly gone crazy. 
There are no English Life Guards in Copenhagen. But 
there is certainly a missing button at the back of my 
trousers.” 

It was the chorus of the Tivoli Music Hall which was 
providing the Guard of Honor, and they were tall and 
lovely ladies. 

I was caught napping again, not very long ago, when 
the King of the Belgians granted my request for a special 
interview. An official of the British Embassy, who con¬ 
veyed that acceptance to me, also advised me that I must 
wear a frock coat and top hat when I visited the Palace, 
for that appointment which, he said, was at four o’clock. 
I had come to Brussels without a frock coat—and indeed 
I had not worn that detestable garment for years—and 
without a top hat. I decided to buy or hire them in 
Brussels. 

It was Saturday morning, and I spent several hours 
searching for ready-made frock coats. Ultimately I hired 
one which had certainly been made for a Belgian burgo¬ 
master of considerable circumference—and I am a lean 
man, and little. I also acquired a top hat which was of a 
style favored by London cabbies forty years ago, low 
in the crown and broad and curly in the brim. I carried 
these parcels back, hoping that by holding my hat in the 
presence of Majesty, and altering the buttons on the 
frock coat, I might maintain a dignified appearance. 

I did not make a public appearance in that costume 
however, as I missed the hour for the interview owing to 
a mistake of the British Embassy. 

As a young man, before serious things like wars and 
revolutions, plagues and famines entered into my sphere 
of work, I spent most of my days on>The Daily Mail, The 

8 





ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Daily Chronicle, and other papers, chasing the “stunt” 
story, which was then a new thing In English journalism, 
having crossed the water from the United States and 
excited the Imagination of such pioneers as Harmsworth 
and Pearson. The old dullness and dignity of the Eng¬ 
lish Press had been rudely challenged by this new outlook 
on life, and by the novel interpretation of the word 
“news” by men like Harmsworth himself. Formerly 
“news” was limited in the imagination of English editors 
to verbatim reports of political speeches, the daily record 
of police courts, and the hard facts of contemporary his¬ 
tory, recorded in humdrum style. Harmsworth changed 
all that. “News,” to him, meant anything which had a 
touch of human interest for the great mass of folk, any 
happening or idea which affected the life, clothes, customs, 
food, health, and amusements of middle-class England. 
Under his direction. The Daily Mail, closely imitated by 
many others, regarded life as a variety show. No “turn” 
must be long or dull. Whether It dealt with tragedy or 
comedy, high politics or other kinds of crime, it was 
admitted, not because of Its importance to the nation or 
the world, but because It made a good “story” for the 
breakfast table. 

In pursuit of that Ideal—not very high, but not a bad 
school for those in search of human knowledge—I became 
one of that band of colleagues and rivals who were sent 
here, there, and everywhere on the latest “story.” It led 
us Into queer places, often on foolish and futile missions. 
It brought us in touch with strange people, both high 
and low in the social world. It was my privilege to meet 
kings and princes, murderers and thieves, politicians and 
publicans, saints and sinners, along the roads of life In 
many countries. As far as kings are concerned, I cannot 
boast that familiarity once claimed by Oscar Browning 
who, when he showed the ex-Kaiser over Cambridge, as¬ 
serted to the undergraduates who questioned him after- 

9 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

ward that “He is one of the nicest emperors I have ever 
met.” 

With rogues and vagabonds I confess I have had a 
more extensive acquaintance. The amusement of the 
game of finding, a “story” was the unexpectedness of the 
situation in which one sometimes found oneself, and 
the personal experience which did not appear in print. 
As a trivial instance, I remember how I went to inquire 
into a ghost story and became, surprisingly, the ghost. 

Down in the West of England there was, and still is, 
a great house so horribly haunted (according to local 
tales) that the family to which it has belonged for cen¬ 
turies abandoned its ancient splendor and lived near by 
in a modern villa. Interest was aroused when a young 
chemist claimed that he had actually taken a photograph 
of one of the ghosts during a night he had spent alone in 
the old house. I obtained a copy of this photograph, 
which was certainly a good “fake,” and I was asked to 
spend a night in the house myself with an Irish pho¬ 
tographer who might have equal luck with some other 
spirit. 

Together w^e traveled down to the haunted house, 
which we found to be an old Elizabethan mansion sur¬ 
rounded by trees, and next to a graveyard. It was dark 
when we arrived, with the intention of making a burglari¬ 
ous entry. Before ten minutes had passed the Irish 
photographer was saying his prayers, and I had a cold 
chill down my spine at the sighing of the wind through 
the trees, the hooting of an owl, and the little squeaks of 
the bats that flitted under the eaves. With false courage 
we endeavored to make our way into the house. Every 
window was shuttered, every door bolted, and we could 
find no way of entry into a building that rambled away 
with many odd nooks and corners. At last I found a 
door which seemed to yield. 

“Stand back!” I said to the Irish photographer. I 

10 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

took a run and hurled my shoulder against the door. It 
gave, and I was precipitated into a room—not, as I found 
afterward, part of the Elizabethan mansion, but a neigh¬ 
boring farmhouse, where the farmer and his family were 
seated at an evening meal. Their shrieks and yells were 
piercing, and they believed that the ghosts next door 
were invading them. ... I and the photographer fled 
without further explanation. 

On another day I went down into the country to inter¬ 
view a dear old clergyman, who had reached his hun¬ 
dredth year, and had been at school with the famous 
Doctor Arnold of Rugby. The old gentleman was stone 
deaf and for some time could not make out the object 
of my visit. At last it seemed to dawn on him. “Ah, 
yes!” he said. “You are the gentleman who is coming 
to sing at our concert to-night. How very kind of you 
to come all the way from London!” Vainly I endeavored 
to explain that I had come to interview him for a London 
paper. Presently he took me by the arm, and led me into 
his drawing-room, where a charming old lady was sitting. 
by the fire knitting. 

“My dear,” said the centenarian parson, “this gentle¬ 
man has come all the way from London to sing at our 
concert to-night.” 

I explained to her gently that it was not so, but she 
was also deaf, and could only hear her husband when 
she used her ear trumpet. 

“How very kind of you to come all this way!” she 
said graciously. 

Presently another old gentleman appeared on the scene 
and I was presented to him as the young gentleman who 
had come down from London to sing at the concert. 

“Pardon me,” I said; “it’s all a mistake. I’m a news¬ 
paper reporter.” 

But the second old gentleman ignored my explanation. 
He had only caught the word “concert.” 

II 



ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

“Delighted to meet you I” he said. “We are all look¬ 
ing forward to your singing to-night I” 

I slunk out of the house later, and drove back fifteen 
miles to the station. On the way I passed an old horse 
cab conveying a young man in the opposite direction. I 
felt certain that he actually was the young gentleman who 
was going to sing at the concert that night. 

On another occasion I had the unfortunate experience 
of being taken for Mr. Winston Churchill. It was his 
luck and not mine, because it was at a time when a great 
number of Irishmen were lusting for his blood. I am no 
more like Mr. Churchill than I am like Lloyd George, 
except that we are both clean shaven and both happened 
to be driving in a blue car. It was on a day when there 
was trouble in Belfast (that city of peace!) and the 
Orangemen had sworn to prevent Churchill from speak¬ 
ing to the Catholic community on the Celtic Football 
Ground. They lined up for him thousands strong outside 
the railway station where he was due to arrive, and their 
pockets were loaded with “kidney” stones, and iron nuts 
from the shipyards. Churchill is a brave man, and faced 
them with such pluck that they did not attempt to injure 
him at that moment of his arrival, though afterwards they 
attacked his car in Royal Avenue and would have over¬ 
turned it but for a charge of mounted police. He made 
his speech to the Catholic Irish and slipped out of Belfast 
by a different station. The mobs of Orangemen were 
awaiting his return in a blue car to a hotel in Royal 
Avenue, and it was my car, and my clean-shaven face 
under a bowler hat which went back to that hotel and 
caused a slight mistake among them. I was suddenly 
aware of ten thousand men yelling at me fiercely and 
threatening to tear me limb from limb. The police made 
a rush, and I and my companion escaped with only torn 
collars and the loss of dignity after a wild scrimmage 
on the steps of the hotel. For hours the mob waited 

12 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

outside for Mr. Winston Churchill to depart, and I did 
not venture forth until the news of his going spread 
among them. 

Such incidents are not enjoyable at the time. But a 
newspaper man with a sense of humor takes them as part 
of his day’s work, and however trivial they may be, bides 
his time for big events of history in which, after his 
apprenticeship, he may find his chance as a chronicler of 
things that matter. 


I 


I 


5 



II 

I T IS one of the little ironies of a reporter’s life that 
he finds himself at times in the company of those who 
sit in the seats of the mighty and those who possess the 
power of worldly wealth, when he, poor lad, is wondering 
whether his next article will pay for his week’s rent, and 
jingles a few pieces of silver in a threadbare pocket. 

It is true that most newspaper offices are liberal in 
the matter of expenses, so that while a “story” is in 
progress the newspaper man is able to put up at the best 
hotels, to hire motor cars with the ease of a millionaire, 
and to live so much like a lord that hall porters. Ministers 
of State, private detectives, and women of exalted rank 
are willing to treat him as such, if he plays the part well, 
and conceals his miserable identity. But there is always 
the feeling, to a sensitive fellow on the bottom rung of 
the journalistic ladder, that he is only a looker-on of life, 
a play actor watching from the wings, even a kind of 
Christopher Sly, belonging to the gutter but dressed up 
by some freak of fate, and invited to the banquet of the 
great. 

The young newspaper man, if he is wise, and proud, 
with a sense of the dignity of his own profession, over¬ 
comes this foolish sense of inferiority by the noble thought 
that he may be (and probably is) of more importance to 
the world than people of luxury and exalted rank, and 
that, indeed, it is only by his words that many of them 
live at all. Unless he writes about them they do not 
exist. He is their critic, their judge, to some extent their 
creator. He it is who—as a man of letters—makes them 
famous or infamous, who gives the laurels of history to 

Id. 

*) 








ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the man of action—for there is no Ulysses without Homer 
—and who moves through the pageant of life as a modern 
Froissart, painting the word pictures of courts and camps, 
revealing what happens behind the scenes, giving the 
immortality of his words to little people he meets upon 
the way, or to kings and heroes. That point of view, 
with its youthful egotism, has been comforting to many 
young gentlemen who have taken rude knocks to their 
sensibility because of their profession; and there is some 
truth in it. 

As a descriptive writer on London newspapers, I had 
that advantage of being poor among the rich, and lowly 
among the exalted. Among other experiences which fell 
to my lot was that of being a chronicler of royal pro¬ 
cessions, ceremonies, marriages, coronations, funerals, 
and other events in the lives of kings and princes. 

I was once a literary attendant at the birth of a Prin¬ 
cess, and look back to that event with particular gratitude 
because it gave me considerable acquaintance with the 
masterpieces of Dutch art and the beauties of Dutch 
cities. I also learned to read Dutch with fair ease, owing 
to the long delay in the arrival of Queen Wilhelmina’s 
daughter. 

For some reason, at a time before the Great War 
had given a new proportion to world events, this expecta¬ 
tion of an heir to the Dutch throne was considered of 
enormous political importance, as the next of kin was a 
German prince. Correspondents and secret agents came 
from all parts of Europe to the little old city of the 
Hague, and I had among my brothers of the pen two of 
the best-known journalists in Europe, one of whom was 
Ludovic Nodeau of Le Journal and the other Hamilton 
Fyfe of The Daily Mail. 

Every night in the old white palace of the Hague we 
three, and six others of various nationalities, were enter¬ 
tained to a banquet in the rooms of the Queen’s Chamber- 

15 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

lain, the Junkheer van Keen, who had placed his rooms 
at our disposal. Flunkeys in royal livery, with powdered 
wigs and silk stockings, conducted us with candles to a 
well-spread table, and always the Queen’s Chamberlain 
announced to us solemnly in six languages, “Gentlemen, 
the happy event will take place to-morrow I” 

To-morrow came, and a month of to-morrows, but no 
heir to the throne of Holland. Three times, owing to 
false rumors, the Dutch Army came into the streets and 
drank not wisely but too well to a new-born Prince who 
had not come! 

Ludovic Nodeau, Hamilton Fyfe, and I explored Hol¬ 
land, learned Dutch, and saw the lime tree outside the 
palace become heavy with foliage, though it was bare at 
our coming. 

The correspondent of The Times had a particular 
responsibility because he had promised to telephone to 
the British Ambassador, who, in his turn, was to tele¬ 
graph to King Edward, at any time of the day or night 
that the event might happen. But the correspondent of 
The Times, who was a very young man, and “fed up” 
with all this baby stuff, absented himself from the banquet 
one night. In the early hours of the morning, when he 
was asleep at his hotel, the Queen’s Chamberlain ap¬ 
peared, with tears running down his cheeks, and an¬ 
nounced in six languages that a Princess had been born. 

It was Hamilton Fyfe and I who gave the news to the 
Dutch people. As we ran down the street to the post 
office men and women came out on the balconies in their 
night attire and shouted for news. 

“Princess! Princess!” we cried. An hour later the 
Hague was thronged with joyous, dancing people. That 
morning the Ministers of State linked hands and danced 
with the people down the main avenue—as though Lloyd 
George and his fellow ministers had performed a fox¬ 
trot in Whitehall. With quaint old-world customs, her- 

i6 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM ' 

aids and trumpeters announced the glad tidings, already 
known, and driving in a horse cab to watch I had a fight 
with a Dutch photographer who tried to take possession 
of my vehicle. That night the Dutch Army rejoiced 
again, boisterously. 

Although I cannot boast of familiarity with emperors, 
like Oscar Browning, and have been more in the position 
of the cat who can look at a king, according to the 
proverb, I can claim to have heard one crowned head 
utter an epigram on the spur of the moment. It was in 
the war between Bulgaria and Turkey in 1912, and I 
was standing on the bridge over the Maritza River at 
Mustapha Pasha (now the new boundary of the Turks 
in Europe) when Ferdinand of Bulgaria arrived with his 
staff. Because of the climate, which was cold there, I 
was wearing the fur cap of a Bulgarian peasant, a sheep¬ 
skin coat, and leggings, and believed myself to be thor¬ 
oughly disguised as a Bulgar. But the King—a tall, fat 
old man with long nose and little shifty eyes, like a rogue 
elephant—“spotted” me at once as an Englishman, and, 
calling me up to him, chatted very civilly in my own 
language, which he spoke without an accent. At that 
moment there arrived the usual character who always 
does appear at the psychological moment in any part of 
the world’s drama—a photographer of The Daily Mail, 
Ferdinand of Bulgaria had a particular hatred and dread 
of cameramen, believing that he might be assassinated by 
some enemy pretending to “snap” him. He raised his 
stick to strike the man down and was only reassured when 
I told him that he was a harmless Englishman, trying to 
carry out his profession as a press photographer. 

“Photography is not a profession,” said the King. “It’s 
a damned disease.” 

One of the pleasantest jobs in pre-war days was a royal 
luncheon at the Guildhall, when the Lord Mayor of Lon¬ 
don and his Aldermen used to give the welcome of the 

17 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

City to foreign potentates visiting the Royal Family. 
The scene under the timbered roof of the Guildhall was 
splendid, with great officers of the Army and Navy In 
full uniform, Ministers of State In court dress, Indian 
princes In colored turbans, foreign ambassadors glittering 
with stars and ribbons, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen 
in scarlet gowns trimmed with fur, and the royal Guest 
and his gentlemen in ceremonial uniforms. In the court¬ 
yard ancient coaches, all gilt and glass, with coachmen 
and footmen In white wigs and stockings, and liveries 
of scarlet and gold, brought back memories of Queen 
Anne’s London and the pictures of Cinderella going to 
the ball. The gigantic and grotesque figures of Gog and 
Magog, carved in wood, grinned down upon the company 
as they have done through centuries of feasts, and at the 
other end of the hall, mounted In a high pulpit, a white- 
capped cook carved the Roast Beef of Old England, while 
music discoursed In the minstrels’ gallery. 

Our souls were warmed by 1815 port, only brought out 
for these royal banquets, and we sat In the midst of the 
Illustrious and in the presence of princes, with a con¬ 
viction that in no other city on earth could there be such 
a good setting for a good meal. There I have feasted 
with the ex-Kaiser, the Kings of Portugal, Italy, and 
Spain, several Presidents of the French Republic, and the 
King and Queen of England. I remember the 1815 port 
more than the speeches of the kings. 

I also remember on one occasion at the Guildhall that 
It was a brother journalist who seemed to be the most 
popular person at the party. Admirals of the Fleet 
clapped him on the back and said “Hullo, Charlie I” Gen¬ 
erals and officers beamed upon the little man and uttered 
the same words of surprise and affection. Diplomats and 
foreign correspondents who had met “dear old Charlie” 
in South Africa, Japan, Egypt, and the Balkans, and 
drunk wine with him In all the capitals of Europe, greeted 

18 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

him when they passed as though they remembered rich 
jests in his company. It was Charles Hands of The Daily 
Mail, war correspondent, knight-errant of the pen, iron¬ 
ical commentator on life’s puppet show, and good com¬ 
panion on any adventure. 

I once spent an afternoon with the King of Spain and 
his grandees, though I had no right at all to be in their 
company. It was at the marriage of a prince of the 
House of Bourbon with a white-faced lady who had 
descended from the Kings of France in the old regime. 
This ceremony was to take place in an old English house 
at Evesham, in the orchard of England, which belonged 
to the Duke of Orleans, by right of blood heir to the* 
throne of France, as might be seen by the symbol of 
the fleur-de-lis carved on every panel and imprinted on 
every cup and saucer in his home of exile, where he kept 
up a royal state and looked the part, being a very hand¬ 
some man and exceedingly like Henri IV, his great 
ancestor. 

The Duke of Orleans could not abide journalists, and 
strict orders were given that none should be admitted 
before the wedding in a pasteboard chapel, still being 
tacked up and painted to represent a royal and ancient 
chapel on the eve of the ceremony. 

For fear of anarchists and journalists a considerable 
body of police and detectives had been engaged to hold 
three miles of road to Wood Norton and guard the gates. 
But I was under instructions to describe the preparations 
and the arrival of all the princes and princesses of the 
Bourbon blood who were assembling from many countries 
of Europe. With this innocent purpose, I hired a respec¬ 
table-looking carriage at the livery stables of Evesham, 
and drove out to Wood Norton. As it happened, I fell 
into line with a number of other carriages containing the 
King and Queen of Spain and other members of the 
family gathering. Police and detectives accepted my 

19 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

carriage as part of the procession, and I drove unchal¬ 
lenged through the great gilded gates under the Crown of 
France. 

I was received with great deference by the Duke’s 
major domo, who obviously regarded me as a Bourbon, 
and with the King and Queen of Spain and a group of 
ladies and gentlemen, I inspected the pasteboard chapel, 
the wedding presents, the floral decorations of the ban¬ 
queting chamber, and the Duke’s stables. The King of 
Spain was very merry and bright, and believing, no doubt, 
that I was one of the Duke’s gentlemen, addressed various 
remarks to me in a courteous way. I drove back in the 
dark, saluted by all the policemen on the way, and wrote 
a description of what I had seen, to the great surprise 
of my friends and rivals. " - " 

Next day I attended the wedding, and saw the strange 
assembly of the old Blood Royal of France and Spain 
and Austria. One of the Bourbon princes came from 
some distant part of the Slav world, and, in a heavy fur 
coat reaching to his heels, a fur cap drawn over his ears, 
a gold chain round his neck, and rings, not only on all 
his fingers, but on his thumbs as well, looked like a bear 
who had robbed the jewelers’ shops in Bond Street. At 
the wedding banquet one of the foreign noblemen drank 
too deeply of the flowing cup, and, upon entering his 
carriage afterward, danced a kind of pas seiil and hummed 
a little ballad of the Paris boulevards, to the scandal of 
the footmen and the undisguised amusement of King 
Alfonso. 

I made another uninvited appearance among royalty, 
and to this day blush at the remembrance of my audacity, 
which was unnecessary and unpardonable. It was when 
King George and Queen Mary opened the Exhibition at 
the White City at Shepherd’s Bush, London. 

They had made a preliminary inspection of the place, 
on a filthy day when the exhibition grounds were like 

20 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the bogs of Flanders, and when the King, with very 
pardonable irritation, uttered the word “Damnl” when 
he stepped into a puddle which splashed all over his 
uniform. “Hush, George!” said the Queen. “Wait till 
we get home 1” 

On the day of the opening, vast crowds had assembled 
in the grounds, but were not allowed to enter the exhibi¬ 
tion buildings until the royal party had passed through. 
The press were kept back by a rope at the entrance way, 
in a position from which they could see just nothing at 
all. I was peeved at this lack of consideration for pro¬ 
fessional observers, and when the royal party entered 
and a cordon of police wheeled across the great hall to 
prevent the crowd from following, I stepped over the 
rope and joined the royal procession. As it happened, 
the police movement had cut off one of the party—a 
French Minister of State who, knowing no word of Eng¬ 
lish, made futile endeavors to explain his misfortune, and 
received in reply a policeman’s elbow in his chest and the 
shout of “Get back there 1 ” 

I took his place. The King’s detective had counted 
his chickens and was satisfied that I was one of them. 
As I was in a new silk hat and tail coat, I looked as dis¬ 
tinguished as a French Minister, or at least did not arouse 
suspicion. The only member of the party who noticed my 
step across the rope was Sir Edward Grey. He did not 
give me away, but smiled at my cool cheek with the sus¬ 
picion of a wink. As a matter of fact, I was not so cool 
as I looked. I was in an awkward situation, because all 
the royal party and their company were busily engaged in 
conversation, with the exception of Queen Alexandra who, 
being deaf, lingered behind to study the show cases instead 
of conversing. Having no one to talk to, I naturally 
lingered behind also, and thus attracted the kindly notice 
of the Queen Mother, who made friendly remarks about 
the exhibition, not hearing my hesitating answers. For 

21 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the first time I saw a royal reception by great crowds 
from the point of view of royalty instead of the crowd— 
a white sea of faces, indistinguishable individually, but One 
big, staring, thousand-eyed face, shouting and waving 
all its pocket handkerchiefs, while bands played “God 
save the King” and cameras snapped and cinema operators 
turned their handles. When I returned to my office I 
found the news editor startled by many photographs of 
his correspondent walking solemnly beside Queen Alex¬ 
andra. . . . The French Minister made a formal protest 
about his ill treatment. 

King Edward was not friendly to press correspondents, 
especially if they tried to peep behind the scenes, but 
many times I used to go down to Windsor, sometimes to 
his garden parties, and often when the German Emperor 
or some other sovereign was a guest at the castle. I am 
sure there was more merriment in the Castle Inn where 
the journalists gathered than within the great old walls 
of the castle itself, where, curiously enough, my own 
father was born. 

These royal visits were generally in the autumn, and 
the amusement of the day was a hattue of game in Wind¬ 
sor Forest, in which the Prince of Wales, now King 
George, was always the best shot. The German Emperor 
was often one of the guns, but seemed to find no pleasure 
in that “sport”—which was a massacre of birds, and 
preserved an immense dignity which never relaxed. Little 
King Manuel, then of Portugal, shivered with cold in 
the dank mists of the English climate, and only King 
Alfonso seemed to enjoy himself, as he does in most 
affairs of life. 

Another journey to be made once a year by a little 
band of descriptive writers—we were mostly always the 
same group—was when King Edward paid his yearly 
visit to the Duke of Devonshire in his great mansion at 
Chatsworth, in the heart of Derbyshire. Always there 

22 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

was a torchlight procession up the hills from the station 
to the house, and the old walls of Chatsworth were 
illumined by fireworks which turned its fountains into 
fairy cascades, and the great, grim, ugly mansion into an 
enchanter’s palace. Private theatricals were provided 
for the entertainment of the King—Princess Henry of 
Pless and Mrs. Willie James being the star turns. The 
performances struck me as being on the vulgar side of 
comedy, but King Edward’s love of a good laugh was a 
reasonable excuse, and surely a king, more than most men, 
gains more wisdom from the vulgar humor of people than 
from the solemnities of state. 

I used to be billeted in a cottage at Eversley near Chats¬ 
worth, while other members of the press put up at an 
old hotel kept by an old lady who had more dignity 
even than the Duchess. She insisted upon everybody 
going to bed, or turning out, at eleven o’clock, and 
this was a grievance to a young journalist named Holt 
White, then of The Daily Mail, who was neck and neck 
with me in a series of chess games. One night when we 
were all square on our games and walking back together 
to the cottage at Eversley, he said: “We must have 
that decisive game. Let’s go back and get the chess 
things.” 

I agreed, but when we returned to the hotel, we found 
it in darkness and both bolted and barred. By means of 
a clasp knife. Holt White made a burglarious entry into 
the drawing-room, but unfortunately put his foot on a 
table laden with porcelain ornaments, and overturned it 
with an appalling crash. We fled. Dogs barked, bells 
rang, and the dignified old lady who kept the hotel put 
her head out of the window and screamed “Thief I” This 
attempted burglary was the talk of the breakfast table 
next morning at the Devonshire Arms, and was only 
eclipsed in interest by a “scoop” of Holt White’s, who 
startled the readers of The Daily Mail by the awful an- 

23 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

nouncement that the Duke had cut his whiskers, historic 
in the political caricatures of England. 

I had the honor of acting as one of a bodyguard, in a 
very literal sense, to King Edward on the day he won the 
Derby. When Minoru won, a hundred thousand men 
broke all barricades and made a wild rush toward the 
Royal Stand, cheering with immense enthusiasm. Ac¬ 
cording to custom, the winner had to lead in his horse, 
and without hesitation King Edward left the safety of 
his stand to come on to the course amid the seething, 
surging, stampeding mass of roughs. The Prince of 
Wales, now King George, looked very nervous, for his 
father’s sake, and King Edward, though outwardly calm, 
was obviously moved to great emotion. I heard his quick 
little panting breaths. He was in real danger, because of 
the enormous pressure of the foremost mob, being pushed 
from behind by the tidal wave of excited humanity. The 
King’s detective shouted and used his fists to keep 
the people back, as involuntarily they jostled the King. 
The correspondents, photographers, and others linked 
arms and succeeded in keeping a little air space about the 
King until he had led his horse safely inside. 

By a curious freak of chance, I and a young colleague 
on the same paper —The Daily Chronicle —were the first 
people in the world, outside Buckingham Palace, to hear 
of the death of King Edward. 

The official bulletins were grave, but not hopeless, and 
the last issued on the night of his death was more cheerful. 
All day I had been outside the Palace, writing in the rain 
under an umbrella, a long description of the amazing 
scenes which showed the depths of emotion stirred in the 
hearts of all classes by the thought that Edward VII was 
passing from England. 

I believe now that beyond the hold he had on the minds 
of great numbers of the people because of his human 
qualities and the tradition of his statesmanship and “tact,” 

24 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

there was an Intuitive sense In the nation that after his 
death the peace of Europe would be gravely disturbed by 
some world war. I remember that thought was expressed 
to me by a man In the crowd who said: “After Edward— 
Armageddon I” It was a great, everchanglng crowd 
made up of every condition of men and women In London 
—duchesses and great ladles, peers and costers, actresses, 
beggars, workingwomen, foreigners, politicians, parsons, 
shop girls, laborers, and men of leisure, all waiting and 
watching for the next bulletin. At eight o’clock, or 
thereabouts, I went Into the Palace with other press men, 
and Lord Knollys assured us that the King was expected 
to pass a good night, and that no further bulletin would 
be Issued until the following morning. 

With that good news I went back to the office and pre¬ 
pared to go home, but the news editor said, as news 
editors do, “Sorry, but you’ll have to spend the night at 
the Palace—In case of anything happening.” 

I was tired out, and hungry. I protested, but In vain. 
The only concession to me was that I should take a col¬ 
league, named Eddy, to share the vigil outside the Palace. 

Eddy protested, but wlthout^more avail. Together we 
dined, and then decided to hire a four-wheeled cab, drive 
Into the palace yard, and go to sleep as comfortably as 
possible. This Idea proceeded according to plan. By 
favor of the police, our old cab was the only vehicle 
allowed Inside the courtyard of the Palace, though outside 
was parked an Immense concourse of automobiles in 
which great folk were spending the night. 

Eddy unlaced his boots, and prepared to sleep. I 
paced the courtyard, smoking the last cigarette, and 
watching the strange picture outside. 

Suddenly a royal carriage came very quietly from the 
inner courtyard and passed me where I stood. The lights 
from a high lamp-post flashed Inside the carriage, and I 
saw the faces of those who had been the Prince of Wales 

25 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

and Princess Mary. They were dead white, and their 
eyes were wet and shining. 

I ran to the four-wheeled cab. 

“EddyI” I said, “I believe the King is dead!” 

Together we hurried to the equerries’ entrance of the 
Palace and went inside through the open door. 

I spoke to one of the King’s gentlemen, standing with 
his back to the fire, talking to an old man whom I knew 
to be the Belgian Minister. 

“How is the King?” I asked. 

He looked up at the clock, with a queer emotional 
smile which was not of mirth, but very sad. 

“Sir,” he said, in a broken voice, “King Edward died 
two minutes ago.” 

The news was confirmed by another official. Eddy and 
I hurried out of the Palace and ran out of the courtyard. 
From the Buckingham Palace Hotel I telephoned the news 
to The Daily Chronicle office. . . . The official bulletin 
was not posted at the gate until an hour later, but when 
I went home that night I held a copy of my paper which 
had caught the country editions, with the Life and Death 
of King Edward VII. 


26 


Ill 


O N the day following the death of King Edward, I 
obtained permission to see him lying in his death 
chamber. The little room had crimson hangings, and 
bright sunlight streamed through the windows upon the 
bed where the King lay with a look of dignity and peace. 
I was profoundly moved by the sight of the dead King 
who had been so vital, so full of human stuff, so friendly 
and helpful in all affairs of state, and with all conditions 
of men who came within his ken. 

In spite of the severe discipline of his youth in the 
austere tradition of Queen Victoria—perhaps because of 
that—he had broken the gloomy spell of the Victorian 
Court, with its Puritanical narrowing influence on the 
social life of the people, and had restored a happier and 
more liberal spirit. Truly or not, he had had, as a young 
Prince of Wales, the reputation of being very much of a 
“rip,” and certain scandals among his private friends, 
with which his name was connected, had made many 
tongues wag. But he had long lived all that down when, 
in advanced middle age, he came to the throne, and no 
one brought up against him the heady indiscretions of 
youth. 

He had played the game of kingship well and truly, 
with a desire for his people’s peace and welfare, and had 
given a new glamour to the Crown which had become 
rather dulled and cobwebbed during the long widowhood 
of the old Queen. In popular imagination he was the 
author of the Entente Cordiale with France, which seemed 
to be the sole guarantee of the peace of Europe against 
the growing menace of Germany, though now we know 

27 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

that it had other results. Anyhow, Edward VII, by some 
quality of character which was not based on exalted 
jdealism but was perhaps woven with the genial wisdom 
of a man who had seen life in all its comedy and illusion, 
and had mellowed to it, stood high in the imagination of 
the world, and in the affection of his people. Now he 
lay with his scepter at his feet, asleep with all the ghosts 
of history. 

His death chamber was disturbed by what seemed to 
me an outrageous invasion of vulgarity. In life King 
Edward had resented the click of the camera wherever 
he walked, but in death the cameramen had their will of 
him. A dozen or more of them surrounded his bed, 
snapping him at all angles, arranging the curtains for 
new effects of lights, fixing their lenses close to his dead 
face. There was something ghoulish in this photo¬ 
graphic orgy about his deathbed. 

The body of King Edward was removed to West¬ 
minster Hall, whose timbered roof has weathered seven 
centuries of English history, and there he lay in state, 
with four guardsmen, motionless, with reversed arms and 
heads bent, day and night, for nearly a week. That week 
was a revelation of the strange depths of emotion stirred 
among the people by his personality and passing. They 
were permitted to see him for the last time, and, without 
exaggeration, millions of people must have fallen into 
line for this glimpse of the dead King, to pay their last 
homage. From early morning until late night, unceas¬ 
ingly, there were queues of men and women of all ranks 
and classes, stretching away from Westminster Hall 
across the bridges, moving slowly forward. There was 
no preference for rank. Peers of the realm and ladies 
of quality fell into line with laboring men and women, 
slum folk, city folk, sporting touts, actors, women of 
Suburbia, ragamuffin boys, coster girls, and all manner of 
men who make up English life. History does not record 

28 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

any such demonstration of popular homage, except one 
other, afterward, when the English people passed in hun¬ 
dreds of thousands before the grave of the Unknown 
Soldier in Westminster Abbey. 

I saw George V proclaimed King by Garter King-at- 
Arms and his heralds in their emblazoned tabards, from 
the wall of St. James’s Palace. Looking over the wall 
opposite, which enclosed the garden of Marlborough 
House, was the young Prince of Wales with his brothers 
and sister. That boy little guessed then that this was the 
beginning of a new chapter of history which would make 
him a captain in the greatest war of the world, where 
he would walk in the midst of death and see the flower 
of English youth cut down at his side. 

At Windsor, in St. George’s Chapel, I saw the burial 
of King Edward. His body was drawn to the Castle on 
a gun carriage by bluejackets, and the music of Chopin’s 
Funeral March, that ecstasy of the spirit triumphing over 
death, preceded him up the castle hill. Against the gray 
old walls floral tributes were laid in masses from all the 
people, and their scent was rich and strong in the air. 
On the castle slopes where sunlight lay, spring flowers 
were blooming, as though to welcome this home-coming 
of the King. Kings and princes from all nations, in 
brilliant uniforms, crowded into St. George’s Chapel, and 
it was a foreign King and Emperor who sorted them out, 
put them into their right places, acted as Master of the 
Ceremony, and led forward Queen Alexandra, as though 
he were the chief mourner, and not King George. It was 
the German Kaiser. The Kings of Spain and Portugal 
wept unaffectedly, like two schoolboys who had lost their 
father, and indeed, this burial of King Edward in the 
lovely chapel where so many of his family lie sleeping 
was strangely affecting, because it seemed like the passing 
of some historic era, and was so, though we did not know 
it then, certainly. 


29 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

The task fell to me of describing the coronation of the 
new King in Westminster Abbey, and of all the great 
scenes of which I have been an eyewitness, this remains 
in my memory as the most splendid and impressive. As a 
lover of history, that old Abbey, which has stood as the 
symbol of English faith and rule since Norman days, is 
to me always a haunted place, filled with a myriad 
ghosts of the old vital past. And the coronation of an 
English king, in its ancient ritual, blots out modernity, 
and takes one back to the root sentiment of the race which 
is our blood and heritage. One may, in philosophical 
moments, think kingship an outworn institution, and jeer 
at all its pomp and pageantry. One’s democratic soul 
may thrust all its ritual into the lumber room of antique 
furniture, but something of the old romance of its mean¬ 
ing, something of its warmth and color in the tapestry 
of English history, something of that code of chivalry and 
knighthood by which the King was dedicated to the serv¬ 
ice of his peoples, stirs in the most prosaic mind alive 
when a king is crowned again in the Abbey Church of 
Westminster. 

The ceremony is, indeed, the old ritual of knighthood, 
ending with the crowning act. The arms and emblems 
of kingship are laid upon the altar, as when a knight 
kept vigil. He is stripped of his outer garments, and 
stands before the people, bare of all the apparel which 
hides his simplicity, as a common man. 

There was a dramatic moment when this unclothing 
happened to King George. The Lord Chamberlain could 
not untie the bows and knots of his cloak and surcoat, and 
the ceremony was held up by an awkward pause. But he 
was a man of action, and pulling out a clasp knife from his 
pocket, slashed at the ribbons till they were cut. . . . 

Looking down the great nave from a gallery above, I 
saw the long purple robes of the peers and peeresses, the 
rows of coronets, the little pages, like fairy-tale princes, 

30 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

on the steps of the sanctuary, the Prince of Wales himself 
like a Childe Harold, in silk doublet and breeches, the 
Archbishop and Bishops, Kings-at-Arms, and officers of 
state, busy about the person of the King who was helpless 
in their hands as a victim of sacrifice, clothing him, 
anointing him, crowning him, before the act of homage 
in which all the Lords of England moved forward in their 
turn to swear fealty to their liege, who, in his turn, had 
sworn to uphold the laws and liberties of England. A 
cynic might scoff. But no man with an artist’s eye, and 
no man with Chaucer and Shakespeare in his heart, could 
fail to see the beauty of this mediaeval picture, nor fail 
to feel the old thrill in that heritage of ancient customs 
which belong to the poetry and the heart of England. 

I, at least, was moved by this sentiment, being, in 
those days, an incurable romantic, though the war killed 
some of my romanticism. But even romance is not proof 
against the material needs of human flesh, and as the 
ceremony went on, hour after hour, I felt the sharp bite 
of hunger. We had to be in our places in the Abbey by 
half-past seven that morning, and keep them until three 
in the afternoon. I had come provided with half a dozen 
sandwiches, but, with a foolish trust in hungry human 
nature, left them for a few minutes while I walked to 
the end of the gallery to see another aspect of the picture 
below. When I came back, my sandwiches had disap¬ 
peared. I strongly suspected, without positive proof, a 
famous lady novelist who- was in the next seat to mine. 
It was a deplorable tragedy to me, as after the ceremony 
I had to write a whole page for my paper, and there was 
no time for food. 

Among other royal events which I had to record was 
King George’s Coronation Progress through Scotland, 
which was full of picturesque scenes and romantic mem¬ 
ories. The Scottish people were eager to prove their 
loyalty and for hundreds of miles along the roads of 

31 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Scotland they gathered in vast cheering crowds, while all 
the way was guarded by Highland and Lowland troops 
of the Regular and Territorial Armies. For the first 
time I saw the fighting men of bonnie Scotland, and little 
dreamed then that I should see their splendid youth in 
the ordeal of battle, year after year, and foreign fields 
strewn with their bodies, as often I did, in Flanders and 
in France. 

There were four or five correspondents, of whom I 
was one, allowed to travel with the King. We had one 
of the royal motor cars, and wherever the King drove, 
we followed next to his equerries and officers. It was an 
astonishing experience, for we were part of the royal pro¬ 
cession and in the full tide of that immense, clamorous 
enthusiasm of vast and endless crowds which awaited the 
King’s coming. Our eyes tired of the triumphal arches, 
floral canopies, flag-covered cities and hamlets, through 
which we passed, and of those turbulent waves of human 
faces pressing close to our carriage. Our ears wearied of 
the unceasing din of cheers, the noise of great multitudes, 
the skirl of the pipes, the distressing repetition of “God 
Save the King” played by innumerable brass bands, sung 
for hundreds of miles by the crowds, by masses of school 
children, by Scottish maidens of the universities, by old 
farmers, standing bareheaded as the King passed. We 
pitied any man who had to pass his life in such a way, 
smiling, saluting, keeping the agony of weariness out of 
his eyes by desperate efforts. 

I am bound to say that the correspondents’ car bright¬ 
ened up the royal procession considerably. One of our 
party was an Edinburgh correspondent, who has been 
made by nature in the image of a celebrated film actor of 
great fatness, with a cheery, full-moon face of benevolent 
aspect. ■ The appearance of this figure immediately follow¬ 
ing the King, and so quick upon the heels of solemnity, 
had a devastating effect upon the crowds. They positively 

32 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

yelled with laughter, believing that they recognized their 
“movie” favorite. Highland soldiers, with their rifles 
at the “present,” stiff and impassive as statues, wilted, 
and grinned from ear to ear. Scottish lassies from the 
factories and farms, whose eyes had shone and cheeks 
flushed at the sight of the King, had a quick reaction, and 
shrieked with mirth. 

They could not place the correspondents at all. Some 
thought we were “the foreign ambassadors.” Others put 
us down as private detectives. But the most astonishing 
theory as to our place and dignity in the procession was 
uttered by an old Scottish farmer at Perth. The King 
had halted to receive a loyal address, and the crowd was 
jammed tight against our carriage. We could hear the 
comments of the crowd and the usual question about our 
identity. The old farmer gazed at us with his blue eyes 
beneath shaggy brows, and plucked his sandy beard. 

“Eh, mon,” he said, seriously, “they maun be the King’s 
barstards.” 

I laughed from Perth to Stirling Castle, and back again 
to Edinburgh. 

We dined in old castles, lunched with Scottish regi¬ 
ments, saw the old-time splendor of Holyrood at night, 
with old coaches filled with the beauty of Scottish ladies 
passing down the High Street where once, in these old 
.wynds and courtyards, the nobility of Scotland lived and 
quarreled and fought, and where now barefoot bairns and 
ragged women dwell in paneled rooms in direst poverty. 
Again and again they sang old Jacobite songs as the King 
passed, forgetting his Hanoverian ancestry, and one sweet 
song to Bonnie Charlie—“Will ye no come back again?” 
—haunts me now, as I write. 

With the King, we saw the great shipbuilding works 
on the Clyde, where thousands of riveters gathered round 
the King, cheering like demons, and looking rather like 
demons with their black faces and working overalls. The 

33 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

King was admirable in his manner to all of them, and, 
though his fatigue must have -been great, his good nature 
enabled him to hide it. His laughter rang out loudest 
when he passed under the hulk of a ship on the stocks 
and saw scrawled hugely in chalk upon its plates: “Good 
old George! We want more Beer!” 

Another great scene of which I was an eyewitness was 
the King’s Coronation Review of the British fleet at Spit- 
head. It was a marvelous pageant of the grim and silent 
power of the British navy as the royal yacht passed down 
the long avenues of battleships and cruisers, in perfect 
line, enormous above the water line, terrible in the poten¬ 
tiality of their great guns. Every navy in the world had 
sent a battleship to salute the King-Admiral of the British 
navy. The Stars and Stripes, the Rising Sun of Japan, 
the long coils of the Chinese Dragon, the tricolor of 
France, the imperial colors of Germany, were among the 
flags, which included those of little nations, with a few 
destroyers and light cruisers as their naval strength. 

All the ships were “dressed” and “manned,” with 
sailors standing on the yard arms and along the decks, 
and as the King’s yacht passed each ship, the royal salute 
was fired, and the crew cheered lustily in the echo of the 
guns. All but one ship, which was the Von der Thann of 
Germany. No sound of cheering came from that battle¬ 
ship, but the German crew maintained absolute silence. 
Few noticed it at the time, but I remarked it with uneasy 
foreboding. 

I also contrasted it later with the greeting given to the 
Kaiser by a group of English people at Hamburg, not a 
year before the war, in which England and Germany de¬ 
voted all their strength to each other’s destruction. I 
was on a voyage in one of the Castle Line boats, and we 
put off at Hamburg to be entertained by the Mayor in 
his palace of the Town Hall. The Kaiser was expected, 
and we lined up to await his arrival. It was heralded by 

34 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the three familiar notes of his motor horn, and when he 
appeared there was a loud “Hip, hip, horrahl” from the 
English party. The Emperor acknowledged the greeting 
with a grim salute. He had no love for England then in 
his heart, and believed, I think, in that ^^unvermeidlicher 
Krieg ^^—that “unavoidable war”—which was already the 
text of German newspapers, though in England the warn¬ 
ings of a few men like Lord Roberts seemed to be the 
foolishness of old age, and popular imagination refused 
to believe in a world gone mad and tearing itself in 
pieces for no apparent cause. 

When that war happened, I caught a glimpse, now 
and again, in lulls between its monstrous battles, of the 
man I had seen when he went weeping from the bedside 
of King Edward; whom I had seen bowing his head under 
the burden of the crown which came to him; whom I had 
followed in triumphant processions through his peaceful 
kingdom—peace seemed so lasting and secure, then—and 
who had come to visit his youth of the Empire, dying in 
heaps in defense of their race and power and tradition, 
as they truly believed, and as, indeed, was so, whatever 
the wickedness and folly that led to that massacre, on 
the part of statesmen of all countries who did not foresee 
and prevent the world conflict. 

On his first visit the King was not allowed to get any¬ 
where near the firing line, but was restricted to base areas 
and hospitals and convalescent camps, and distant views 
of the battlefields. On his second visit, he insisted upon 
going far forward, and would not be deterred by the 
generals, who, naturally, were intensely anxious for his 

safety. 

With another war correspondent—Percival Phillips, 
I think—I went with the King over the Vimy Ridge where 
there was always, at that time, the chance of meeting a 
German shell, and to the top of “Whitesheet Hill,” which 
was a very warm place indeed a few days after the battle 

35 


I 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

which captured it. The Prince of Wales was with his 
father, and by that time well hardened to the noise of 
guns and shell bursts. To the King it was all new, but 
he was perfectly at ease and lingered, far too long, as 
the generals thought, among the ruins of a convent, re¬ 
duced to the size of a slag-heap, on the top of the hill 
looking over the German lines. As though they were 
aware of his visit, the Germans put down a very stiff dose 
of five-point-nines on the very spot where the King had 
been standing, but a few minutes too late, because he had 
just descended the slope of the hill and was examining 
one of the monster mine craters which we had blown at 
the beginning of the battle. He was there for ten minutes 
or so, and had hardly moved away before the Germans 
lengthened their range and laid down harassing fire 
around the crater. The King adjusted his steel hat, and 
laughed, while the Prince of Wales strolled about, look¬ 
ing rather bored. 

The Prince did a real job out there, and though, as an 
officer on the “Q” side of the Guards, he was not sup¬ 
posed to go into the danger zone, he was constantly in 
forward places which were not what the Tommies called 
“health resorts.” I met him one day going into Vermelles, 
which was a very ugly place indeed, with death on the 
prowl amid its ruins. He and a Divisional General left 
their car on the edge of the ruins while they walked 
forward, and, on their return, found that their poor 
chauffeur had had his head blown off. 

Another time when the King saw a little of the “real 
thing” was when he visited the Guards in their camp 
behind the lines near Pilkem. Their headquarters were 
in an old monastery, and the King and the officers took 
tea in the garden, while the band of the Grenadiers 
played selections from Gilbert and Sullivan. I remember 
it was when they were playing “Dear Little Buttercup” 
that three German aeroplanes came overhead, flying very 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

low. To our imagination they seemed to be searching for 
the King, and we expected at any moment they would 
unload their bombs upon his tea table and his body. Our 
anti-aircraft guns immediately opened fire, and there was 
a shrieking of three-inch shells until the blue sky was all 
dappled with the white puffs of the “Archies.” The 
enemy planes circled round, had a good look, and then 
flew away without dropping a bomb, much to our relief, 
for one good-sized bomb would have made a horrible 
mess in the Guards’ camp, and might have killed the 
King. 

That afternoon I was trapped into a little conspiracy 
against the King by the old abbot of the monastery. He 
was immensely anxious for the King to sign the visitors’ 
book, but the officers put the old man off by various ex¬ 
cuses. Feeling sorry for his disappointment, I promised 
to say a word to the King’s aide-de-camp, and advised the 
old gentleman to intercept the King down the only path 
he could use on his way out, carrying the great leather 
book, and a pen and ink, so that there would be no escape. 
This little plot succeeded, to the huge delight of the 
abbot, and the monks who afterward gave me their 
united blessings. 

On the King’s first visit to the army in France, a most 
unfortunate accident happened to him, which was very 
painful and serious. He was reviewing part of the Air 
Force on a road out of Bethune, mounted on a horse 
which ought to have been proof against all the noise of 
military maneuvers. But it was too much for the animal’s 
nerves when, at the conclusion of the review, the silent 
lines of men suddenly broke into deafening cheers. 
The horse reared three times, and the King kept his seat 
perfectly. But the third time, owing to the greasy mud, 
the horse slipped and fell sideways, rolling over the King. 
Generals dismounted, and ran to where he lay motionless 
and a little stunned. They picked him up and put him 

37 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Into his motor car, where he sat back feebly, and with a 
look of great pain. I happened to be standing on a 
bank Immediately opposite, and one of the King’s 
A.D.C.’s, greatly excited, ran up to me and said: “Tell 
the men not to cheer I” It was impossible for me, as a 
war correspondent, to give any such order, and. Indeed, it 
was too late, for when the King’s car moved down the 
road, the other men, who had not seen the accident, 
cheered with Immense volleys of enthusiastic noise. 

The King tried to raise his hand to the salute, but 
had not the strength. He had been badly strained, suf¬ 
fered acute pain, and that night was In a high fever. On 
the following day I saw him taken away In an ambulance, 
like an ordinary casualty, and no soldiers In the little old 
town of Bethune knew that It was the King of England 
who was passing by. 

Before the end of his second visit, the King received 
the five war correspondents who had followed the fortunes 
of the British Armies in France through all their great 
battles, and he spoke kind words to us which we were 
glad to hear. 


38 


IV 


I N spite of my long and fairly successful career as a 
journalist, I have rarely achieved what is known as 
a “scoop,” that is to say, an exclusive story of sensational 
interest. On the whole, I don’t much believe in the editor 
or reporter who sets his soul on “scoops,” because they 
create an unhealthy rivalry for sensation at any price— 
even that of truth—and the “faker” generally triumphs 
over the truthteller, until both he and the editor who 
encouraged him come a cropper by being found out. 

That is not to say that a man should not follow an 
advantage to the utmost and his luck where it leads him. 
It is nearly always luck that is one of the essential ele¬ 
ments in journalistic success, and sometimes, as in a game 
of cards, it deals a surprisingly fine hand. The skill is in 
making the best use of this chance and keeping one’s 
nerve in a game of high stakes. 

The only important “scoop” that I can claim, as far 
as I remember, was my discovery of Doctor Cook after 
his pretended discovery of the North Pole. That was 
due to a lucky sequence of events which led me by the 
hand from first to last. The story is amusing for that 
reason, and this is the first time I have written the nar¬ 
rative of my strange experiences in that affair. 

My first stroke of luck, strange as it may seem, was 
my starting twenty-four hours later than forty other cor¬ 
respondents in search of the explorer at Copenhagen. If 
I had started at the same time, I should have done what 
they did, and perhaps taken the same line as they did. As 
it was, I had to play a lone hand and form my own 
judgment. 


39 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I had arrived at the Daily Chronicle office from some 
country place when E. A. Perris, the news editor, now the 
managing editor, said in a casual way: 

“There’s a fellow named Doctor Cook who has dis¬ 
covered the North Pole. He may arrive at Copenhagen 
to-morrow. Lots of other men have the start of you, 
but see if you can get some kind of a story.” 

I uttered the usual groan, obtained a bag of gold from 
the cashier, and set out for Copenhagen by way of the 
North Sea. On a long and tiresome journey I repeated 
the name “Doctor Cook,” lest I should forget it, won¬ 
dered if I knew anything about Arctic exploration, and 
decided I didn’t, and accepted the probability that I should 
be too late to find the great explorer, and shouldn’t know 
what to ask him if I found him. 

I arrived in Copenhagen dirty, tired, and headachy in 
the evening. I wanted above all things^ a cup of strong 
coffee, and with the German language, communicated my 
desire to a taxi driver. He took me to a rather low- 
looking cafe, filled with men and women and tobacco 
smoke. That was my second stroke of luck, for if I had 
not gone to that particular cafe I should never have met 
Doctor Cook in the way that happened. 

Over my cup of coffee I looked at the Danish paper, 
and could read only two words, “Doctor Cook.” A young 
waiter served me, and when I found that he spoke Eng¬ 
lish, I asked him if Doctor Cook, the explorer, had ar¬ 
rived in Copenhagen. 

“No,” said the waiter. “He ought to have been here 
*at midday. But there’s a fog in the Cattegat, and his 
boat will not come in until to-morrow morning. All 
Denmark is waiting for him.” 

So he had not arrived! Well, I might be in time, 
after all. I looked round for any journalist I might know, 
but did not see a familiar face. 

Presently, as I sat smoking a cigarette, I perceived a 

40 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

suddenly awakened interest among the people in the cafe. 
It was due to the arrival of a very pretty lady in a white 
fur toque, with a white fox-skin round her neck, accom¬ 
panied by another young lady, and a tall Danish fellow 
with tousled hair. They took their seats at the far end 
of the cafe. 

The young waiter came up to me and whispered with 
some excitement: 

“Did you see that beautiful lady? That is Mrs. 
Rasmussen I” 

The name meant nothing to me, and when I told him 
so, he was shocked. 

“She’s the wife of Knud Rasmussen, the famous ex¬ 
plorer. It was he who provided Doctor Cook with his 
dogs before he set out for the North Pole. They are 
great friends.” 

I was aware that luck was befriending me. From that 
lady, if I had the pluck to speak to her, I could at least 
find out something about the mysterious Doctor Cook, 
and perhaps get a good story about him, whether I could 
meet him or not. 

I struggled with my timidity, and then went across the 
cafe and made my bow to the pretty lady, explaining that 
I was a newspaper man from London, who had come all 
the way to interview Doctor Cook, who was, I under¬ 
stood, a friend of her distinguished husband. Could she 
tell me how to find him? 

Mrs. Rasmussen who was highly educated and ex¬ 
tremely handsome, spoke a little French, a little German, 
and a very little English. In a mixture of these three 
tongues we understood each other, helped out by the 
young Dane, who was Peter Freuchen, a well-known 
traveler in the Arctic regions, and a very good linguist. 

Mrs. Rasmussen was friendly and amused. She told me 
it was true her husband was a great friend of Doctor 
Cook, and that he was the last man who had seen him 

41 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

before he went toward the North Pole. For that reason 
she wanted to be one of the first to greet him. A launch, 
or tug, belonging to the director of the Danish-Greenland 
Company, had made ready to go down the Cattegat to 
meet the Hans Egede with Doctor Cook on board, and 
she had hoped to make that journey. But the fog had 
spoiled everything, and the launch would leave in the 
morning instead at a very early hour. It was very 
disappointing I 

“Surely,” I said, “if you really want to go, it would 
be excellent to travel to Elsinore to-night, put up at a 
hotel, and get on board the launch at dawn. If you would 
allow me to accompany you-” 

Mrs. Rasmussen laughed at my adventurous plan. 

According to her, the last train had gone to Elsinore. 

“Let us have a taxi and drive there I” 

She told me that no motor car was allowed to drive 
at night beyond a certain distance from Copenhagen. It 
would mean a fine, or imprisonment, for the driver with¬ 
out special license. 

It seemed incredible. 

I summoned my friendly young waiter, and asked him 
to bring in a taxi driver. In less than a minute a burly 
fellow stood before me, cap in hand. Through the waiter 
I asked him how much he wanted to drive a party that 
night to Elsinore. He shook his head, and, according to 
the waiter, replied that he could not risk the journey, as 
he might be heavily fined. 

“How much, including the fine?” I asked. 

If he had demanded fifty pounds, I should have paid it 
—with Daily Chronicle money. 

To my amazement, he asked the modest sum of five 
pounds, including the fine. 

I turned to Mrs. Rasmussen, Peter Freuchen, and the 
other lady, and invited them all to make the journey in 
“my” motor car. 


42 



ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

They hesitated, laughed, whispered to each other, and 
were, as I could see, tempted by the lure of the adventure. 

“But,” said Mrs. Rasmussen, “when we get there, sup¬ 
posing you were not allowed on the launch by the Director 
of the Danish-Greenland Company? He is our friend. 
But you are, after all, a stranger!” 

“I should have had an amusing drive,” I said. “It 
would be worth while. Perhaps you would tell me what 
Doctor Cook says, when you return.” 

They laughed again, hesitated quite a time, then ac¬ 
cepted the invitation. It was arranged that we should 
start at ten o’clock, when few people would be abroad 
outside the city, where we should have to travel with 
lights out to avoid the police. There still remained an 
hour or so. We had dinner, talked of Doctor Cook, and 
at ten o’clock started out in the taxi, and I thought how 
incredible it was that I should be sitting there, opposite 
a beautiful lady with a silver fox round her throat, with 
a laughing girl by her side, and a young Danish explorer 
next to the driver, riding through Denmark with lights 
out, to meet a man who had discovered the North Pole, 
and whose name I had never heard two days before. 
These things happen only in journalism and romance. 

We had not gone very far when, driving through a 
village, we knocked over a man on a bicycle. People came 
running up through the darkness. Peter Freuchen leaped 
down from his seat to pick up the man, who seemed to be 
uninjured, and there was a great chatter in the Danish 
tongue, while I kept on shouting to Freuchen, “How much 
to pay?” After a while he resumed his seat and said, 
“Nodings to pay!” So we went on again, and after a 
long, cold drive without further incident, reached Elsi¬ 
nore, where Hamlet saw his father’s ghost. 

At the hotel there we had something hot to drink, and 
then Mrs. Rasmussen caught sight of a dapper little man 
who was the Director of the Danish-Greenland Company 

43 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

and the owner of the launch which was to meet Doctor 
Cook. 

I was left in the background while my three companions 
entered into conversation with him. From the expres¬ 
sion on their faces, I soon saw that they were disap¬ 
pointed, and I resigned myself to the thought that I had 
the poorest chance of meeting the explorer’s ship at sea. 

Presently Mrs. Rasmussen came back. 

“He won’t take us,” she said. 

“Hard luck!” 

“But,” she added, “he will take you!” 

That sounded ridiculous, but it was true. The pomp¬ 
ous little man, it seemed, had had applications from half 
the ladies of Copenhagen, including his own wife, per¬ 
haps, to take them on his tug to meet the hero of the 
North Pole. He had refused them all, in order to favor 
none at the expense of others. It was impossible for 
him to take Mrs. Rasmussen and her friends. He very 
much regretted that. But when they told him that I was 
an English journalist, he said there would be a place for 
me with two or three Danish correspondents. 

Amazing chance! But hard on the little party I had 
brought to Elsinore I They were very generous about 
the matter, and wished me good luck when I embarked 
on the small tug which was to steam out to a lightship in 
the Cattegat and at dawn go out to meet the Hans Egede, 
as Cook’s ship was called. Like a fool, I left my over¬ 
coat behind and nearly perished of cold, until an hour 
later I had climbed up an iron ladder to the lightship in a 
turbulent sea and descended into the skipper’s cabin, 
where there was a joyous “fugg” and some hot cocoa 
spiced with a touch of paraffin. 

At dawn we saw, far away up the Cattegat, a little 
ship all gay with bunting. It was the Hans Egede. We 
steamed toward it, lay alongside, and climbed to its top 
deck up a rope ladder. There I saw a sturdy, handsome 

44 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Angl o-Saxon-looklng man, in furs, surrounded by a group 
of hairy and furry men, Europeans and Eskimos, and 
some Arctic dogs. There was no journalistic rival of 
mine aboard, except the young Danes with us. 

I went up to the central figure, whom I guessed to be 
Doctor Cook, introduced myself as an English press man, 
shook hands with him, and congratulated him on his heroic 
achievement. 

He took my arm in a friendly way, and said, “Come 
and have some breakfast, young man.” 

I sat next to him in the dining saloon of the Hans 
Egede, which was crowded with a strange-looking com¬ 
pany of men and women, mostly in furs and oilskins, with 
their faces burned by sunlight on snow. The women 
were missionaries and the wives of missionaries, and 
their men folk wore unkempt beards. 

I studied the appearance of Doctor Cook. He was 
not bearded, but had a well-shaven chin. He had a pow¬ 
erful face, with a rather heavy nose and wonderfully blue 
eyes. There was something queer about his eyes, I 
thought. They avoided a direct gaze. He seemed ex¬ 
cited, laughed a good deal, talked volubly, and was rest¬ 
less with his hands, strong seaman’s hands. But I liked 
the look of him. He seemed to me typical of Anglo- 
Saxon explorers, hard, simple, true. 

In response to my request for his “story,” he evaded 
a direct reply, until, later in the morning, the Danes and 
I pressed him to give us an hour in his cabin. 

It was in the saloon, however, that he delivered him¬ 
self, unwillingly, I thought, into our hands. As the two 
or three young Danes knew but little English, the inter¬ 
view became mainly a dialogue between Doctor Cook and 
myself. I had no suspicion of him, no faint shadow of a 
thought that all was not straightforward. Being vastly 
ignorant of Arctic exploration, I asked a number of sim¬ 
ple questions to extract his narrative; and, to save my- 

45 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

self trouble and get good “copy,” I asked very soon 
whether he would allow me to see his diary. 

To my surprise, he replied with a strange defensive 
look that he had no diary. His papers had been put on a 
yacht belonging to a man named Whitney, who would 
take them to New York. 

“When will he get there?” I asked. 

“Next year,” said Doctor Cook. 

“But surely,” I said, still without suspicion, “you have 
brought your journal with you? The essential papers?” 

“I have no papers,” he said, and his mouth hardened. 

“Perhaps I could see your astronomical observations?” 
I said, and was rather pleased with that suggestion. 

“Haven’t I told you that I have brought no papers?” 
he said. 

He spoke with a sudden violence of anger which startled 
me. Then he said something which made suspicion leap 
into my brain. 

“You believed Nansen,” he said, “and Amundsen, and 
Sverdrup. They had only their story to tell. Why don’t 
you believe me?” 

I had believed him. But at that strange, excited pro¬ 
test and some uneasy, almost guilty, look about the man, 
I thought, “Hullo! What’s wrong? This man pro¬ 
tests too much.” 

From that moment I had grave doubts of him. I 
pressed him several times about his papers. Surely he was 
not coming to Europe, to claim the greatest prize of ex¬ 
ploration, without a scrap of his notes, or any of his 
observations? He became more and more angry with 
me, until for the sake of getting some narrative from 
him, I abandoned that interrogation, and asked him for 
his personal adventures, the manner of his journey, the 
weights of his sledges, the number of his dogs, and so on. 
As I scribbled down his answers, the story appeared to me 
more and more fantastic. And he contraicted himself 

46 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

several times, and hesitated over many of his answers, 
like a man building up a delicate case of self-defense. By 
intuition, rather than evidence, by some quick instinct of 
facial expression, by some sensibility to mental and moral 
dishonesty, I was convinced, absolutely, at the end of an 
hour, that this man had not been to the North Pole, but 
was attempting to bluff the world. I need not deal here 
with the points in his narrative, and the gaps he left, 
which served to confirm my belief. . . . 

In sight of Copenhagen the Hans Egede was received 
by marvelous demonstrations of enthusiasm. The water 
was crowded with craft of every size and type, from 
steam yachts to rowing boats, tugs to pinnaces, with flags 
aflutter. Cheers came in gusts, unceasingly. Sirens 
shrieked a wailing homage, whistles blew. Bands on 
pleasure steamers played “See the Conquering Hero 
Comes.” 

Doctor Cook, the hero, was hiding in his cabin. He 
had to be almost dragged out by a tall and splendid Dane 
named Norman Hansen, poet and explorer, who after¬ 
ward constituted himself Doctor Cook’s champion and 
declared himself my enemy, because of my accusations 
against this man. 

Doctor Cook came out of his cabin with a livid look, 
almost green. I never saw guilt and fear more clearly 
written on any human face. He could hardly pull him¬ 
self together when the Crown Prince of Denmark boarded 
his ship and offered the homage of Denmark to his glori¬ 
ous achievement. 

But that was the only time in which I saw Cook lose 
his nerve. 

Landing on the quayside, I had to fight my way through 
an immense surging crowd, which almost killed the object 
of their adoration by the terrific pressure of their mass, 
in which each individual struggled to get near him. I 
heard afterward that W. T. Stead, the famous old 

47 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

journalist of the Review of Reviews^ which afterward I 
edited, flung his arms round Doctor Cook, and called 
upon fellow journalists to form his bodyguard, lest he 
should be crushed to death. 

On the edge of the crowd I met the first English jour¬ 
nalist I had seen. It was Alphonse Courlander, a very 
brilliant and amusing fellow, with whom I had a close 
friendship. When he heard that I had been on Cook’s 
ship and had interviewed him for a couple of hours, he had 
a wistful look which I knew was a plea for me to impart 
my story. But this was one of the few times when I 
played a lone hand, and I ran from him, and jumped on 
a taxi in order to avoid the call of comradeship. I knew 
that I had the story of the world. 

In a small hotel, distant from the center of the city, 
I wrote it to the extent of seven columns, and the whole 
of it amounted to a case of libel, making a definite chal¬ 
lenge to Cook’s claim and ridiculing the narrative which 
I set forth as he had told it to me. When I had handed 
it into the telegraph office I knew that I had burned my 
boats, and that my whole journalistic career would be 
made or marred by this message. 

During the time I had been writing. Doctor Cook had 
been interviewed by forty journalists in one assembly. 
W. T. Stead, as doyen of the press, asked the questions, 
and at the end of the session spoke on behalf of the whole 
body of journalists in paying his tribute of admiration and 
homage to the discoverer of the North Pole. Spellbound 
by Stead’s enthusiasm, and not having had my advantage 
of that experience on the Hans Egede, there was not a 
man among that forty who suggested a single word of 
doubt about the achievement claimed by Cook. By a 
supreme chance of luck, I was alone in my attack. 

I will not disguise my sense of anxiety. I had a deep 
conviction that my judgment was right, but whether I 
should be able to maintain my position by direct evidence 

48 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

and proof, was not so certain in my mind. I knew, next 
day, that my dispatch had been published by my paper, 
for great extracts from it were cabled back to the Danish 
press and they caused an immense sensation in Copen¬ 
hagen, and as the days passed in an astounding fortnight, 
when I continued my attack by further and damning 
accusations against Cook, I was the subject of hostile 
demonstrations in the restaurants and cafes, and the 
Danish newspaper Politiken published a murderous-look¬ 
ing portrait of me and described me as “the liar Gibbs’’— 
a designation which afterward they withdrew with hand¬ 
some apologies. 

The details of the coil of evidence I wove about the 
feet of Cook need not be told in full. He claimed that 
he had told his full story to Sverdrup, a famous explorer 
in Copenhagen, and that Sverdrup pledged his own honor 
in proof of his achievement. 

Afterward I interviewed Sverdrup and obtained a state¬ 
ment from him that Cook had given no proof whatever 
of his claim. 

He professed to have handed his written narrative and 
astronomical observations to the University of Copen¬ 
hagen, and it was claimed on his behalf by the Danish 
press that these papers had been examined by astro¬ 
nomical and geographical experts who were absolutely 
satisfied that Cook had reached the North Pole. 

From the head of the University I obtained a state¬ 
ment that Cook had submitted no such papers and had 
advanced no scientific proof. 

Using his own narrative to me, which I had scribbled 
down as he talked, I enlisted the help of Peter Freuchen 
and other Arctic travelers, to analyze his statements 
about his distances, his sledge weights, the amount of food 
drawn by his dogs, and his time-table. They proved to 
be absurd, and when he contradicted himself to other 
interviewers, I was able, with further expert advice, to 

49 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

contradict his contradictions. It was a great game, which 
I thoroughly enjoyed, though I worked day and night, 
with only snatches of rest for food and sleep. 

But I had some nasty moments. 

One was when a statement was published in every 
newspaper of the world that the Rector of the Copen¬ 
hagen University had flatly denied my interview with him 
and reiterated his satisfaction with the proofs submitted 
by Doctor Cook. 

The Daily Chronicle telegraphed this denial to me and 
said, “Please explain.” 

I remember receiving that telegram shortly after read¬ 
ing the same denial in the Danish newspapers, brought to 
me by Mr. Oscar Hansen, the Danish correspondent of 
my own paper, who was immensely helpful to me. I was 
thunderstruck and dismayed, for if the Rector of the 
University denied what he had told me, and maintained a 
belief in the bona fides of Cook, I was utterly undone. 

At that moment W. T. Stead approached me and put 
his hand on my shoulder. He, too—still the ardent cham¬ 
pion of Cook—had read that denial. 

“Young man,” he cried, in his sonorous voice, “you 
have not only ruined yourself, which does not matter 
very much, but you have also ruined The Daily Chronicle, 
for which I have a great esteem.” 

“Mr. Stead,” I said, “I am a young and obscure man, 
compared with you, and I appeal to your chivalry. Will 
you come with me to the Rector of Copenhagen Univer-’ 
sity and act as my witness to the questions I shall put to 
him, and to the answers he gives?” 

“By all means,” he said, “and to make things quite 
' beyond doubt, we will take two other witnesses—the 
correspondent who issued the statement about the denial, 
and another of established character.” 

The two other witnesses were a French count, acting 
as the correspondent of a great French newspaper and 

50 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the representative of a news agency who had issued the 
university statement, and believed in its truth. 

It was a strange and exciting interview with that 
Rector. For a long time he refused to open his lips to 
say a single word one way or the other about the Cook 
case. He relented slowly when W. T. Stead made an 
eloquent plea on my behalf, and said that my honor was 
at stake on his word. 

The correspondent who had published the denial of 
my interview tried to intervene, speaking in rapid German 
which I could hardly follow, endeavoring to persuade 
the Rector to uphold the statement issued with regard 
to the University. But the Frenchman, acting as my 
second, as it were, sternly bade him speak in English 
or French which all could understand, and to give me the 
right of putting my questions. This was upheld by Stead. 

I put my questions exactly word for word as I had done 
in the first interview. 

Had Doctor Cook submitted any journal of his travels 
to the University? 

Had he submitted any astronomical observations? 

Had he presented any proof at all of his claim to have 
reached the Pole? 

The Rector hesitated long before answering each ques¬ 
tion in the negative. The man was profoundly disturbed. 
Undoubtedly, as I knew later, the University, with the 
King as its President, had deeply involved itself by offer¬ 
ing an honorary degree to Cook. As its chief representa¬ 
tive, this man was in a difficult and dangerous position, 
if he turned down Cook’s claim. It was at least five 
minutes before he answered the last question. Then, as 
an honest man, he answered, as he had done before when 
I saw him alone, “No!” 

I breathed a deep sigh of relief. If he had been a dis¬ 
honest man, my reputation and career would have been 
utterly ruined. 


51 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I asked him to sign the questions and answers as I 
had written them down, but for a long time he refused 
to put his signature. Then he signed, but as he handed 
me the paper, he said: “Of course that must not be pub¬ 
lished in the newspapers.” 

I protested that in that case it was useless, and both 
Stead and the French correspondent argued on my behalf. 
I had the paper in my breast pocket, and when the 
Rector gave a timorous consent to its publication, I left 
the room with deep words of thanks, and fairly ran out 
of the gate of the University lest he should change his 
mind, or the paper should be taken from me. It was 
published in The Daily Chronicle, and in hundreds of 
other papers. 

A second blow befell me. 

I had resumed acquaintanceship with Peter Freuchen 
and Mrs. Rasmussen, and at lunch one day she showed 
me a long letter which she had received from her husband, 
the explorer who, as I have told, had been Cook’s best 
friend, and had provided his dogs and Eskimos. 

Mrs. Rasmussen, smiling, said: “You, of all men, 
would like to read that letter.” 

“Alas that I do not know Danish I” I answered. 

She marked one paragraph with a pencil, and said, 
“Perhaps I will let you copy out those words.” 

It was Peter Freuchen who copied out the words in 
Danish, and Oscar Hansen who translated them into Eng¬ 
lish, on a bit of paper which I tore out of my notebook. 

They were a repudiation by Knud Rasmussen of his 
faith in Cook, and a direct suggestion that he was a knave 
and a liar. 

These words were, of course, vitally interesting to me, 
and, indeed, to the world, for the fame and honor of 
Rasmussen were high, and his name had been used as 
the best guarantee of Cook’s claim. With Mrs. Ras¬ 
mussen’s permission, I telegraphed her husband’s words 

52 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

in my message that day. They were immediately repro¬ 
duced in all the Danish papers, and made a new sensation. 

But my private sensation was far more emotional when, 
in crossing a square the following evening, a Danish jour¬ 
nalist showed me a paper and said, “Have you seen this?” 

It was a formal denial by Mrs. Rasmussen that she had 
ever shown me a letter from her husband, or that he had 
ever written the words I had published. 

That was a severe shock to me. I could not under¬ 
stand it, or indeed believe it. That very day Peter 
Freuchen and Mrs. Rasmussen had been my guests at 
lunch, and as friendly as possible. Probably some ma¬ 
licious journalist had invented the letter. . . . 

It was late at night, and I could not find either Peter 
Freuchen or Mrs. Rasmussen, nor did I ever see the lady 
again, because, on account of certain high influences, she 
disappeared from Copenhagen. 

I remembered the bit of paper on which the words 
had been written down in Danish by Peter Freuchen and 
translated into English by Oscar Hansen. That docu¬ 
ment was very precious, and my only proof, but I couldn’t 
find it in my pockets or my room. My room at the hotel 
was a wreck of papers, but that one scrap evaded all 
search. At last, down on my hands and knees, I found it 
screwed up under the bed, and gave a cry of triumph. 

My old friend and true comrade, Oscar Hansen, made 
an affidavit that he had translated Freuchen’s words, the 
editor of a news agency swore to Freuchen’s handwriting, 
and I issued an invitation to Mrs. Rasmussen to submit 
her husband’s letter to a committee of six, half appointed 
by herself and half by me. If they denied that the letter 
contained the words I had published, I would pay a certain 
heavy sum, which I named, to Danish charities. That 
invitation was not accepted, and my words were believed. 

I have already described in a previous column of these 
memories the banquet to Doctor Cook which I attended 

53 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

in the dress clothes of my young friend the waiter. It 
was an historic evening, for, in the middle of that dinner 
came the famous message from Peary in which he an¬ 
nounced his own arrival at the Pole and repudiated Cook’s 
claim. 

I stood close to Doctor Cook when that message was 
handed to him, and I am bound to pay a tribute to his 
cool nerve. He read the message on the bit of flimsy, 
handed it back, and said, “If Peary says he reached the 
Pole, I believe him!” 

His manner at all times, after that temporary break¬ 
down on the Hans Egede was convincing. It was mar¬ 
velous on the day when the doctor’s degree—the highest 
honor of the University—was conferred upon him, and 
before all the learned men there he ascended the pulpit 
of the University chapel and in a solemn oration stretched 
out his arms and said, “I show you my hands—they are 
clean I” 

At that moment I was tempted to believe that Cook 
believed he had been to the North Pole. Sometimes, re¬ 
membering the manner of the man, I am tempted to 
think so still—though now there is no doubt that he never 
went anywhere near his goal. 

I used to meet him on neutral ground at the American 
Minister’s house in Copenhagen, where I handed round 
Miss Egan’s tea cakes. Doctor Cook would never accept 
any cake from me! Maurice Egan, the Minister, was 
immensely courteous and kind, and Miss Egan confided 
to me that if I proved to be right about Doctor Cook, 
in whom she believed, she would lose her faith in human 
nature. Since then, though I was proved right, she has 
regained her faith in human nature, as I know from her 
happy marriage in the United States. 

One other slight shock disturbed my mental poise in 
this fortnight of sensation. It v/as when I read in the 
Politiken a challenge to a duel, publicly addressed to me 

54 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

by Norman Hansen, the poet and explorer. He was a 
tall man, six foot three or so in his socks, and very power¬ 
ful. I am five-foot-six or so in my boots. If we met, I 
should die. I did not answer that challenge I But on the 
day when Doctor Cook left Copenhagen, with a wreath of 
roses round his bowler hat, and when I had done my job 
with him, the crowd which had gone down to the quayside 
to see the last of him, parted, and I found myself face 
to face with Norman Hansen. 

Some one in the crowd said: 

“When is that duel to be fought?’’ 

Norman Hansen came toward me, and held out his 
hand, with a great jolly laugh. 

“We will never fight with the sword,” he said, “but 
only with the pen I” 

We didn’t even fight with the pen, for he lost all faith 
in Cook, and sometimes from northern altitudes I get 
kind and generous messages from him. 

W. T. Stead maintained his belief in Cook until the 
University of Copenhagen formally rejected Cook’s claim 
and canceled his honorary degree, when the evidence of 
his own papers, which afterward arrived, and the story of 
his own Eskimos, left no shred of doubt in his favor. 

Then I had a note from the great old journalist. 

“I have lost and you have won,” he wrote, and after 
that used generous words which I need not publish. 

Truly it was a queer, exciting incident in my journalistic 
life, and looking back upon it, I marvel at my luck. 


55 


V 


B y a young journalist, or an old one, there Is always 
an adventure to be found in London, as In any great 
city of the world where the passions of men and women, 
the conflict of life, the heroism and crimes of human 
nature, its dreams. Its madness, and Its faith, are but 
thinly masked behind the commonplace aspect of modern 
streets, and beneath the drab cloak of dullness of modern 
civilization. 

It was my hobby In those early Fleet Street days to 
explore the underworld of London and to get behind the 
scenes of its monstrous puppet show. I sought out the 
queer characters not yet “standardized” by the discipline 
of compulsory education or the conventions of middle- 
class manners. 

I dived Into the foreign quarters of London and found 
that most nations of Europe, and the races of the East, 
had their special sanctuaries In the great old city, in which 
they preserved their own speech and habits and faith. 

In the Russian quarter I met victims of the tyranny 
of Czardom, who had escaped from Siberian prisons and 
still bore the marks of their chains and lashes; and the 
Russian Jews, too, who had come to England to save 
themselves from the pogroms of Riga and other cities. 
I found many of them working as tailors and seamstresses 
In back rooms of tenement houses, Whitechapel way, 
abominably overcrowded, but earning high wages. It 
was a revelation to me that they did most of the “black” 
work for great West End firms, so that Mayfair received 
Its garments from the East End, with any diseases that 
might be carried with them from those foetid little fac- 

56 




ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

tones. Thousands of them were employed in cigarette 
factories, and spent their days filling little spills of paper 
with the yellow weed, incredibly fast. According to the 
tradition of not muzzling the ox that treads the corn, 
they were allowed to smoke as much as they liked, and 
both men and women smoked continually. 

I made a study of German London, which, at that time, 
before something happened like an earthquake, had as 
many German clubs as any good-sized city of the Father- 
land, and several German churches, workers’ unions, 
theatrical and musical societies. 

In Soho I poked about French London, lunched at the 
Petit Riche or dined at the Gourmet, and between 
Wardour Street and Old Compton Street met the French 
girls who made artificial flowers for the ballets and 
pantomimes, silk tights for the fairies of the footlights, 
and embroidered shoes which twinkled on the boards. 

Italy in London was one of my earliest discoveries as 
a young writer in search of the picturesque. It was but 
a ten minutes’ walk from my first office, and often in lunch 
time I used to saunter that way, stopping to listen to the 
English cheap-jacks in Leather Lane, on the other side 
of Holborn, and then plunging into a labyrinth of narrow 
lanes and courtyards entirely inhabited by Italians. 

It was a little Naples, in its color, its smells, its dirt. 
Across the courtyards Italian Vv^omen stretched their 
“washing”; and blue petticoats and scarlet bodices, and 
silk scarves for women’s hair gave vivid color to these 
London alleys. The women, as beautiful as Raphael’s 
Madonnas, sang at their washtubs, surrounded by swarms 
of bambini. 

Here, under a baker’s shop kept by an Italian padrone, 
slept o’ nights the little organ grinders and hurdy-gurdy 
boys, who used to wander through the London suburbs 
and far into the countryside, to the delight of English 
nurseries from which coppers were flung down tor these 

57 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

grubby, dark-eyed urchins with little shivering monkeys 
In their coat pockets or on their music boxes. They were 
the slaves of the padrone and had to bring him all their 
earnings and get beaten if they did not bring enough, 
before they slept in the cellars of this London slum, 
among the black beetles and the rats. 

In one back yard lived a gray bear, belonging to two 
wanderers from the mountains of Savoy, and I used to 
hear the rattle of his chains before they led him out on 
his hind legs with a big pole between his paws. 

Above a big yard crowded with piano organs sat, in 
a little room at the top of a high ladder, a fat old Italian 
who put the music on the streets. He sat before an open 
organ case with a roll of cartridge paper into which he 
stabbed little holes, which afterward made the notes 
played by a spiked cylinder when the organ grinder turned 
his handle. It was he who selected the tunes, thus con¬ 
ferring immortality on many poor devils of musicians 
who heard their melodies whistled by the errand boys to 
this music of the streets, and became famous thereby. 
But it was the fat old Italian at the top of the tall ladder 
who was the interpreter of their genius to the popular ear 
of the great public of the streets and slums. He put in 
the trills, and the “twiddley bits,” stabbing with his brad¬ 
awl on the cartridge roll, as though inspired by the divine 
afflatus, while his hair, above a massive face and three 
chins, was all curls and corkscrews, as though crotchets, 
and quavers, semiquavers, and demi-semiquavers, ar¬ 
peggios and chromatics were thrusting through his brain. 

In other yards were men all white from head to heel, 
who made the plaster casts of Napoleon and Nelson, 
Queen Victoria and General Gordon, Venus and Mercury, 
and other favorite characters of history, sold by hawkers 
in Ludgate Hill and other haunts of high art at low 
prices. They also made the casts of classical figures for 
art schools and museums. 


58 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

In the back yards, the basements and the slum kitchens 
was another profitable form of industry which was a 
monopoly of Italians in London in the pre-war days. That 
was the ice cream trundled through the streets with that 
alluring call to youth, “Hokey-pokey penny a lump I” 
From surroundings appallingly free from sanitary super¬ 
vision came this nectar and ambrosia which the urchins 
of the London streets found an irresistible temptation. 

It was a careless word on the subject of this lack of 
sanitation in the ice-cream factories which nearly ended 
my career as a journalist before it was fairly begun. 
Requiring some additional photographs for the second 
instalment of some articles I was writing for a magazine 
—the first, almost, that I ever wrote—I went one Sunday 
morning to Italy in London with an amateur photog¬ 
rapher. We went into one of the courtyards where I 
had made friends with some of the pretty washerwomen, 
but I was no sooner observed by a few of them than, as 
though by magic, the courtyard was filled with a con¬ 
siderable crowd of those whom the Americans call 
“Wops.’’ 

They came up from the basements where they slept as 
many as forty in a cellar—organ grinders, ice-cream ven¬ 
dors, bear leaders, waiters. I was obviously the object 
of passionate dislike. They surrounded me with violent 
gestures and torrential speech, not one word of which did 
I understand. At first I was mildly curious to know what 
all this noise was about, but I saw that things were serious 
when several young men began to flash about their clasp- 
knives. Help came at a critical moment. Three London 
“Bobbies” appeared on the scene, as they generally do, 
in the nick of time. 

“Now, what’s all this about?” 

Seldom before had I heard such a friendly and com¬ 
forting inquiry. 

The crowd melted away. In the quietude that fol- 

59 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

lowed, one young waiter who remained explained to me 
that my published article on the Italian quarter had caused 
great offense, as my reference to the ice-cream factories 
had been taken as an insult. I had used the phrase “dirty 
places” and the Italian colony desired my death. They 
did not get it that Sunday morning. But I was sorry to 
have hurt their feelings, as I had an affectionate regard 
for those people. 

I was abominably near a nasty accident, owing to a 
misplaced sense of humor, when the Mohammedans in 
London celebrated the Feast of Ramadan, as they do each 
year at the Holborn Restaurant. That is one of the most 
unlikely places in which to meet Romance. On all the 
other days of the year it is given over to public banquets 
of Odd Fellows and Good Fellows, Masons, and Ro- 
tarians, and the business man of London when he puts on 
a hard white shirt, and expands his manly bosom under 
the influence of comradeship, and the sense of holding an 
honorable place among his fellow men of the same social 
grade as himself. Yet, in the Holborn Restaurant there 
is the mystery and the romance of the East, an astonish¬ 
ing, and almost incredible, assembly of Oriental types, 
on that day of Mohammedan rejoicing. 

The first time I went, there were several Indian princes 
in richly colored turbans and gold-embroidered coats, 
some Persians in white robes, Turks wearing the scarlet 
fez, a number of Arabs, some full-blooded African 
negroes, and a group of Indian students. White table¬ 
cloths, used as a rule by business men at their banquets, 
were spread on the floor, and these were used as kneeling 
mats by the Mohammedans, who bowed to the East with 
their foreheads touching the ground and joined in a chant, 
rising and falling in the Oriental scale, with strange 
wailings, as one among them read extracts from the 
Koran, and between whiles seemed to carry on a musical 
and melancholy conversation with the Faithful. 

6o 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

My trouble was that I wanted to laugh. There was 
nothing to laugh at, and much to admire in the intense 
faith of these Mohammedan worshipers, but there are 
times, probably due to nervousness, when some little 
demon tickles one into a desperate desire to relieve one’s 
emotion by mirth. It is what schoolgirls call “the gig¬ 
gles.” I caught the eye of an enormous negro, staring at 
me ferociously, and I failed to hide a fatuous smile. It 
was the queer nasal lamentations of those kneeling men, 
and this scene in the Holborn Restaurant, where I had 
dined the very night before with business men in boiled 
shirts, which stirred my sense of the ridiculous, against 
all my spirit of reverence and decency. I was alarmed at 
myself, and hurriedly left the room. 

Outside the door I leaned against the wall and laughed 
with my handkerchief to my mouth, because of this 
Arabian Nights’ dream in the ridiculous commonplace of 
the Holborn Restaurant. As I did so, the tall negro 
who had been eying me appeared suddenly before me 
in the darkness of the passage. His eyes seemed to 
blaze with rage, and all the wrath of Islam was in him, 
and he crouched a little as though to make a spring 
at me. My misplaced sense of humor left me immedi¬ 
ately! I was out of the Holborn Restaurant and on 
top of a ’bus bound for Oxford Circus, with astonish¬ 
ing rapidity. 

It was not only among the foreigners of London that 
I found strange scenes and odd characters. The life of a 
journalist brings him into touch with the eccentricities of 
human nature, and trains him to keep his eyes open for 
rare birds, philosophers in back streets, odd volumes in 
the bookshelf. 

It was by accident that I discovered a very queer fel¬ 
low who revealed to me a romantic profession. I was 
calling on a Member of Parliament in the old Queen 
Anne house behind Westminster Abbey, when I saw a 

6i 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

smart gig standing by the pavement, a well-dressed young 
man with a clean-shaven face, long nose, and green eyes, 
and, up against the wall, a sack. It was the sack which 
astonished me. Filled with some bulky-looking material, 
it was not like an ordinary sack, but was heaving in a 
most peculiar way. I ventured to address the young man 
with the gig. 

“What on earth’s the matter with that sack?” 

He grinned, and said, “Want to know?” 

Then, very cautiously, he opened the mouth of the 
sack, made a sharp nip with forefinger and thumb, and 
brought out a big-sized rat. 

“There are four hundred in that bag,” he remarked 
proudly, “and all alive and kicking. One has to handle 
’em carefully. They bite like blazes.” 

“What are they for?” I asked. “What are you going 
to do with them?” 

“Sell ’em to fancy gents who like a little sport with 
their dogs on Sunday, down Mitcham way. Care to have 
my card?” 

He handed me a visiting card, and I read the inscrip¬ 
tion, which notified that my new acquaintance was 

*^Rat Catcher to the Lord Mayor and the City of 
London” 

I made an appointment with this dignitary, and found 
that he was the modern Pied Piper, who spent his nights 
in luring the rats of London from riverside warehouses, 
city restaurants, and other establishments along the bed 
of the Thames where they swarmed by the thousand. 

“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, 
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats, 

Grave old plodders, gay young friskers. 

Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins. 

Cocking tails and pricking whiskers. 

Families by tens and dozens. . • 

62 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Every night when the city folk had left their chop- 
houses or their warehouses, this mysterious fellow with 
the greenish eyes went in quietly with four big wire cages, 
some netting, and a long willow wand. The nets, which 
had pouched pockets, he put up against the passages and 
doorways. Then, in the absolute darkness, he stood 
motionless for an hour. Presently there came a patter 
of tiny feet, a squeaking, a glint of ravenous little eyes. 
They were all round him, searching for the crumbs, raven¬ 
ously. Suddenly he uttered a strange beastlike cry, in 
his throat, like yodeling, and whipped the floor with his 
long white wand. The rats were mesmerized, stupefied. 
They tried to make their way back to their holes, but 
fell into the poacher’s nets, dozens and scores, on a good 
hunting night. He emptied them into the cages, covered 
them with white cloths, stood motionless again, waited 
again, made a second bag. At dawn he departed with 
his sack well loaded, to sell to “fancy gents” at four- 
pence each, in the suburbs of London. 

The foreign element in London was, on the whole, very 
law abiding. For centuries London had been the sanc¬ 
tuary of political refugees from many countries of perse¬ 
cution, and it was a tradition, and a good tradition, of 
England, that no questions should be asked as to the 
political faith of those who desired shelter from their 
own rulers. Even the revolutionaries of Europe, and the 
“intellectual” anarchists, had the good sense, for a long 
time, not to stir up trouble or attack the laws of the land 
in which they found such generous exile. This rule, how¬ 
ever, was abruptly broken by a gang of foreign bandits 
who carried out a series of alarming robberies, and, when 
tracked down at last, shot a police inspector and wounded 
others. 

One of their own men was mortally wounded in the 
affray and carried bleeding to a house in Grove Street, 
Whitechapel, one of the worst streets in London, where 

63 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

he died. He was a young Russian, as handsome as a Greek 
god, in the opinion of the surgeons of the London Hos¬ 
pital, with whom I happened to be lunching when one of 
the juniors rushed in with the news that the corpse had 
been secured, against all competitors, by the “London.” 

It was the death of this Russian which gave the clue 
to the habits and whereabouts of the gang with whom he 
had been connected. Their women were caught, and 
“blew the gaff,” and it was discovered that the leader 
of the gang was another young Russian called Peter the 
Painter. Scores of Scotland Yard detectives set out on 
the trail, and another police inspector lost his life in the 
endeavor to arrest three of the bandits at a house in 
Sidney Street, Whitechapel, where they defied all attempts 
at capture by a ruthless use of automatic pistols. Siege 
was laid to the house by the police and detectives, armed 
with revolvers, and an astounding episode happened in 
the heart of London. 

For some reason, which I have forgotten, I went very 
early that morning to the Chronicle office, and was 
greeted by the news editor with the statement that a hell 
of a battle was raging in Sidney Street. He advised me 
to go and look at it. 

I took a taxi, and drove to the corner of that street, 
where I found a dense crowd observing the affair as far 
as they dared peer round the angle of the walls from 
adjoining streets. Heedless at the moment of danger, 
which seemed to me ridiculous, I stood boldly opposite 
Sidney Street and looked down its length of houses. 
Immediately in front of me four soldiers of one of the 
Guards’ regiments lay on their stomachs, protected from 
the dirt of the road by newspaper “sandwich” boards, 
firing their rifles at a house halfway down the street. 
Another young Guardsman, leaning against a wall, took 
random shots at intervals while he smoked a woodbine. 
As I stood near him, he winked and said, “What a game I” 

64 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

It was something more than a game. Bullets were 
flicking off the wall like peas, plugging holes into the 
dirty yellow brick, and ricocheting fantastically. One of 
them took a neat chip out of a policeman’s helmet, and 
he said, “Well, I’ll be blowedi” and laughed in a foolish 
way. It was before the war, when we learned to know 
more about the meaning of bullets. Another struck a 
stick on which a journalistic friend of mine was leaning 
in an easy, graceful way. His support and his dignity 
suddenly departed from him. 

“That’s funny I” he said, seriously, as he saw his stick 
neatly cut in half at his feet. 

A cinematograph operator, standing well inside Sidney 
Street, was winding his handle vigorously, quite oblivious 
of the whiz of bullets which were being fired at a slanting 
angle from the house, which seemed to be the target of 
the prostrate Guardsmen. 

A large police inspector, of high authority, shouted a 
command to his men. 

“What’s all that nonsense? Clear the people back! 
Clear ’em right back! We don’t want a lot of silly 
corpses lying round.” 

A cordon of police pushed back the dense crowd, tread¬ 
ing on the toes of those who would not move fast enough. 

I found myself in a group of journalists. 

“Get back there!” shouted the police. 

But we were determined to see the drama out. It 
Vv^as more sensational than any “movie” show. Imme¬ 
diately opposite was a tall gin palace—“The Rising Sun.” 
Some strategist said, “That’s the place for us!” We 
raced across before the police could outflank us. 

A Jew publican stood in the doorway, sullenly. 

“Whatcher want?” he asked. 

“Your roof,” said one of the journalists. 

“A quid each, and worth it,” said the Jew. 

At that time, before the era of paper money, some of us 

65 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

carried golden sovereigns in our pockets, one to a “quid.” 
Most of the others did, but, as usual, I had not more than 
eighteenpence. A friend lent me the necessary coin, which 
the Jew slipped into his pocket as he let me pass. Twenty of 
us, at least, gained access to the roof of “The Rising Sun.” 

It was a good vantage point, or O.P., as we should 
have called it later in history. It looked right across to 
the house in Sidney Street in which Peter the Painter and 
his friends were defending themselves to the death—a 
tall, thin house of three stories, with dirty window blinds. 
In the house immediately opposite were some more 
Guardsmen, with pillows and mattresses stuffed into the 
windows in the nature of sandbags as used in trench war¬ 
fare. We could not see the soldiers, but we could see 
the effect of their intermittent fire, which had smashed 
every pane of glass and kept chipping off bits of brick 
in the anarchists’ abode. 

The street had been cleared of all onlookers, but a 
group of detectives slunk along the walls on the anar¬ 
chists’ side of the street at such an angle that they were 
safe from the slanting fire of the enemy. They had to 
keep very close to the wall, because Peter and his pals 
were dead shots and maintained something like a barrage 
fire with their automatics. Any detective or policeman 
who showed himself would have been sniped in a second, 
and these men were out to kill. 

The thing became a bore as I watched it for an hour 
or more, during which time Mr. Winston Churchill, who 
was then Home Secretary, came to take command of 
active operations, thereby causing an immense amount of 
ridicule in next day’s papers. With a bowler hat pushed 
firmly down on his bulging brow, and one hand in his 
breast pocket, like Napoleon on the field of battle, he 
peered round the corner of the street, and afterward, as 
we learned, ordered up some field guns to blow the house 
to bits. 


66 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

That never happened, for a reason which we on “The 
Rising Sun” were quick to see. 

In the top-floor room of the anarchists’ house we ob¬ 
served a gas jet burning, and presently some of us noticed 
the white ash of burnt paper fluttering out of a chimney 
pot. 

“They’re burning documents,” said one of my friends. 

They were burning more than that. They were setting 
fire to the house, upstairs and downstairs. The window 
curtains were first to catch alight, then volumes of black 
smoke, through which little tongues of flame licked up, 
poured through the empty window frames. They must 
have used paraffin to help the progress of the fire, for the 
whole house was burning with amazing rapidity. 

“Did you ever see such a game in London!” exclaimed 
the man next to me on the roof of the public house. 

For a moment I thought I saw one of the murderers 
standing on the window sill. But it was a blackened 
curtain which suddenly blew outside the window frame 
and dangled on the sill. 

A moment later I had one quick glimpse of a man’s 
arm with a pistol in his hand. He fired and there was a 
quick flash. At the same moment a volley of shots rang 
out from the Guardsmen opposite. It is certain that they 
killed the man who had shown himself, for afterward they 
found his body (or a bit of it) with a bullet through the 
skull. It was not long afterward that the roof fell in 
with an upward rush of flame and sparks. The inside of 
the house from top to bottom was a furnace. 

The detectives, with revolvers ready, now advanced in 
Indian file. One of them ran forward and kicked at the 
front door. It fell in, and a sheet of flame leaped out. 
. . . No other shot was fired from within. Peter the 
Painter and his fellow bandits were charred cinders in 
the bonfire they had made. 

So ended the “Battle of Sidney Street,” which created 

67 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

intense excitement and indignation throughout England, 
and threw a glare of publicity on to the secret haunts of 
the foreign anarchists in London. 

I was one of those who ^directed the searchlight, for 
the very next day, with Eddy, my colleague, I took up 
residence at 62 Sidney Street, and explored the under¬ 
world of Whitechapel and the Anarchist clubs of the 
Russian and German Jews, who were the leading spirits 
of a philosophy which is now known as Bolshevism. And 
in that quest I had some strange adventures, and met 
some very queer folk. 



68 


VI 


B efore taking lodgings In Sidney Street, White¬ 
chapel, to study the haunts of Peter the Painter and 
his fellow “thugs,” I tried to get a room In the house In 
Grove Street to which the handsome young Russian had 
been carried when he was mortally wounded by the police. 

With my companion Eddy, I knocked at the door of 
this dark little dwelling place. In a sinister street with a 
railed sidewalk, where foreign-looking men lounged about 
In doorways, and young drabs with painted faces started 
out at dusk for the lighted highways. Eddy and I be¬ 
lieved ourselves to be disguised adequately for East End 
life. We had put on our oldest clothes and cloth caps, 
but we were both aware that our appearance In Grove 
Street aroused Immediate suspicion. After three knocks, 
the door was opened on a chain, and a frowsy woman 
spoke to me In Yiddish. I answered In German, which 
she seemed to understand. Upon my asking for a room, 
she undid the chain and opened the door a little way, 
so that I could see the crooked wooden stairs up which 
the man’s body had been carried by two of those men 
who now lay burned to death In Sidney Street. 

The woman asked us to wait, and then went down a 
stinking passage and spoke to a man, as I could hear by 
the voices. While we waited, shadows crept up out of 
the dark street about us, and I saw that we were sur¬ 
rounded by the foreign-looking men who had been loung¬ 
ing In the doorways. The woman came back with a tall, 
bearded man who spoke English. 

“What do you want?” 

“A room for the night.” 

69 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

“What the hell for?” he asked. “Do you know there’s 
been a murder in this house?” 

“That makes no difference,” I said, casually. “It’s 
late and raining, and we want to sleep.” 

“Not here. We don’t want no narks in this house. 
We’re honest people.” 

“All right,” said Eddy. “We’ll go somewhere else.” 

He was moving off, when the man took hold of his 
arm. 

“Perhaps you won’t,” he snarled. “I may get into 
trouble about this, with the cops. You’ll stay here till I 
send a word round to the station.” 

He gave a whistle, and the men lurking in the darkness 
about us pressed closer. They were young Jews of Rus¬ 
sian type, anaemic and white-faced. 

He shoved the man off, and pushed his way through 
the crowd. They jabbered in a foreign tongue, and fol¬ 
lowed a little way, but did not touch us. 

“Let go of my arm, or I’ll hit you,” said Eddy. 

The rain fell faster, and we were splashed with mud. 
With good warm houses in the West of London, it was 
ridiculous to be tramping about the East like this, home¬ 
less and cold. We knocked at many doors in other streets, 
and every answer we had was a rough refusal in Yiddish 
or German to take us in. Not even when we offered as 
much as a sovereign for a night’s shelter. 

“These people don’t like the look of us,” said Eddy. 
“What’s the matter with our money?” 

The truth was, I think, that the affair in Sidney Street 
had thoroughly scared the foreign element in the East 
End, and these people to whom we applied for rooms 
were on their guard at once against two strangers who 
might be police spies or criminals in search of a hiding 
place. They were not accepting trouble either way. 

It was late at night when at last we persuaded an 
Israelite, and master tailor, to rent us a room in Sidney 

70 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Street, next door to the house in which Peter the Painter 
and his friends had defied the armed police of London, 
and escaped capture by dying in the flames. 

From that address Eddy and I wrote a series of articles 
describing our experiences in the East End, among anar¬ 
chists, criminals, and costers. The anarchists were the 
most interesting, and we visited them in their night clubs. 

We went, I remember, to a Russian hotel in White¬ 
chapel, where the chief anarchist club in London had 
established its headquarters through fear of a police 
raid at its old address. Certainly they took no precau¬ 
tions to ensure secrecy, for even outside the hotel, down 
a side street, Eddy and I could hear the stentorian voice 
of one of their orators, and see the shadows of his 
audience on the window blinds. We went into the hotel 
and found the stairs leading to the club room densely 
packed by young men and women, for the most part 
respectably, and even smartly, dressed, of obviously 
foreign race—Russian, German, and Jewish. 

Eddy and I wormed our way upstairs by slow degrees, 
sufficiently close to hear the long, excited speech that was 
being made in German. Here and there at least I heard 
snatches of it, and such phrases as “the tyranny of the 
police,” “the fear of the bourgeoisie/* “the dictatorship 
of the people,” “the liberty of speech,” and “the rights of 
labor to absolute self-government.” Such phrases as 
these were loudly applauded whenever the speaker 
paused. 

“Who is speaking?” I asked of a good-looking young 
fellow sitting on the stairs. 

He answered sullenly: 

“Rocca. What’s that to you?” 

Presently there was a whispering about us. Sullen 
faces under bowler hats held close consultation. Then 
there was a movement on the stairs, jamming Eddy and 
myself against the banisters. 

71 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

“What do you want here?” asked one of the young 
men, aggressively. “If you’re police narks, we’ll turn 
you out 1” 

“Yes, or do you in I” said another. 

“We don’t want any bleeding spies here,” said a 
woman. 

Other expressions of hostility were uttered, and there 
was an ugly look on the faces of these foreign youths. 

I thought it best to tell them frankly that I was merely 
a newspaper reporter on The Daily Chronicle, finding a 
little descriptive material. I should be interested to hear 
the speech upstairs, if they had no objection. 

This candor disarmed them, or most of them, though 
a few raised the cry of “Turn them out!” 

But an elderly man who seemed to have some authority 
raised his hand, and took me under his protection. 

“That’s all right. We’ve nothing to hide. If The 
Daily Chronicle wants our views, it can have them. Better 
come and see Mrs. Rocca.” 

The crowd made way for us on the stairs and my com¬ 
panion and I were led to a narrow landing outside the 
room, where the orator still bellowed in German to a 
packed audience, and then into a little slip of a room 
which I found to be an ordinary bathroom. 

On the edge of the bath sat a well-dressed, rather 
good-looking and pleasant-eyed lady, to whom I was 
introduced, and who was introduced to me as Mrs. Rocca. 
She was the wife of the orator in the next room, and, 
like himself, German. 

She spoke English perfectly, and in the presence of 
half a dozen men who crowded in to listen, we had an 
argument lasting at least an hour, on the subject of 
anarchy. She began by disclaiming, for the anarchists in 
London, all knowledge of and responsibility for the affair 
of Peter the Painter and his associates. They were 
merely common thieves. But it was laughable, she 

72 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

thought, what a panic fear had been caused in middle- 
class London by the killing of a policeman or two. It 
filled columns of the newspapers, with enormous head¬ 
lines. It seemed to startle them as something too hor¬ 
rible and monstrous for imagination. Why all that agita¬ 
tion over the deaths of two guardians of property, when 
there was no agitation at all, no public outcry, no fierce 
clamor for vengeance, because every night men and 
women of the toiling classes were being killed by the 
inhuman conditions of their lives, in foul slums, in over¬ 
crowded bedrooms, in poisonous trades, in sweated indus¬ 
tries, as the helpless slaves of that capitalistic system 
which protected itself by armies of police. The English 
people were the world’s worst hypocrites. They hid a 
putrid mass of suffering, corruption, and disease, caused 
by modern industrialism, and pretended that it did not 
exist. 

“What is your philosophy?” I asked. “How do you 
propose to remedy our present state?” 

“I am an intellectual Nihilist,” said the lady very 
calmly. “I believe in the ultimate abolition of all law, 
all government, all police, and in a free society with per¬ 
fect liberty to the individual, educated in self-discipline, 
love for others, and moral purpose.” 

I need not here repeat her arguments, nor their fan¬ 
tastic disregard of human nature and the stark realities 
of life. She was well read, and quoted all manner of 
writers from Plato to Bernard Shaw, and I marveled 
that such a woman should be living in the squalor of 
Whitechapel as a preacher of the destructive gospel. We 
had a vehement argument, in which Eddy joined, and 
though we waxed hot, and disagreed with each other on 
all issues, we maintained the courtesies of debate, in 
which, beyond any mock modesty, I was hopelessly out¬ 
argued by this brilliant, extraordinary, and dangerous 
woman. 


73 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

It was from acquaintances made in that club that we 
were led into other byways of Whitechapel and heard 
strange and terrible tales of Russian revolutionaries, who 
showed me the sores of fetters and chains about their 
wrists and legs, and swore eternal hatred of the Russian 
Czardom, which crushed the souls of men and women and 
tortured their bodies. They were, doubtless, true tales, 
and it was with the remembrance of those horrors that 
the Russian Revolution was made, in all its cruelty and 
terror, until the autocracy of the Czars was replaced by 
the tryanny of Lenin and the Soviet State, when the 
dream of Russian liberty was killed, for a generation at 
least, in the ruin and famine and pestilence of the people. 

Eddy and I dined in the kosher restaurants of the East 
End, went to the Jewish theater, and explored the haunts 
of the Russian and Oriental Jews of London. 

In our wanderings we discovered the most Oriental 
place this side of Constantinople. It was Hessell Street 
Market, in a deep sunken road, reached by flights of steep 
steps through blocks of buildings in the Commercial Road, 
and quite unknown to most Londoners. On each side 
of the sunken street were wooden booths which looked 
as though they had been there since the time of Queen 
Elizabeth, and at night, when we went, they were lit, 
luridly, by naptha flares. In these booths sat, cross- 
legged, old bearded men with hooked noses, who looked 
as though they were contemporaries of Moses and the 
Prophets. They were selling cheap Oriental rugs, col¬ 
ored cottons and silks, sham jewelery, rabbit skins, kosher 
meat, skinny fowls, and embroidered slippers. The 
crowd marketing in this place, chaffering, quarreling, 
picking over the wares, with the noise of a Turkish 
bazaar, were mostly of Oriental types. Some of the 
men wore fur caps, or astrakhan caps, like the Persians 
who cross the Galata bridge at Constantinople. Others 
wore fur coats reaching to their heels, and top hats of 

74 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

ancient architecture. It was the market of the London 
Ghetto, and thronged with flashy young Jews and Jew¬ 
esses, starved-looking men of Slav aspect, and shifty- 
eyed boys who were professional pickpockets and sold the 
harvest of their day’s toil to the old villains In the booths. 

It was a young thief who acted as our guide to some 
of these places, and he performed a delicate operation In 
the way of housebreaking for our benefit. We were 
eager to get a photograph of Peter the Painter, and he 
told us that he knew of the only one In existence. It 
belonged to a “young lady” who had been Peter’s friend, 
and naturally wished to keep secret her association with 
this bandit. It stood on her bedroom mantelpiece, and 
if we would give him half an hour, he would “pinch” it 
for us. But he would have to replace It after we had 
made use of It. At the end of an hour he returned with 
the photograph of a good-looking young Russian, and 
told us that it had been an “easy job.” This photograph 
was reproduced as the only authentic portrait of Peter 
the Painter, but I have grave doubts about it. 

With this lad, who was an Intelligent fellow and vowed 
that henceforth he was going to lead an honest life, as 
burglary was a mug’s game, he went Into the cellars below 
a certain restaurant which were used as a library of 
anarchist literature. Doubtless there was more high 
explosive here. In the way of destructive philosophy, than 
one might find In Woolwich Arsenal, but we did not 
examine those dangerous little pamphlets and books 
which preached the gospel of revolution. At that time, 
before the advent of Bolshevism in the history of the 
world, that propaganda seemed to have no bearing upon 
the ordinary facts of life, and did not interest us. It 
was at a later period that the International anarchist In 
London translated his textbooks and touted them outside 
the gates of English factories, and slipped them Into the 
hands of unemployed men. 

75 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

In those pre-war days, the foreign revolutionaries in 
London kept themselves aloof from English life and, as 
I have said, generally avoided unpleasant contact with 
the English law. Living in the foulest lodgings—I sicken 
still at the memory of the stench we encountered in some 
of their tenement houses—many of these young tailors, 
cigarette makers, and factory hands dressed themselves 
up in the evening and came down West with their girl 
friends to the music halls and night clubs in the neighbor¬ 
hood of Piccadilly, leaving the older folk to their squalor 
and the children to the playground of the streets and 
courts. 'Now and again they stabbed each other, or cut 
each other’s throats, but, as a rule, such incidents were 
hushed up by their neighbors, and the London police were 
not invited to inquire into affrays between these aliens. 
. . . The war made a great clearance of these foreigners, 
and many of their old haunts have disappeared. 

By the merest chance I saw the disappearance of one 
of the oldest and most historic haunts of London law¬ 
breakers. It was the abandonment of the Old Bailey, 
before its grim and ancient structure was pulled down to 
make way for the new and imposing building where Jus- 
tive again pursues its relentless way with those who fall 
into its grip. Ever since Roman days there has been a 
prison on the site of the Old Bailey, and for hundreds of 
years men and women have languished there in dark 
cells, rattled their chains behind its bars, rotted with jail 
fever, and died on the gallows tree within its walls. The 
dark cruelties of English justice which, in the old days, 
was merciless with all who broke its penal laws, however 
young and innocent till then, belong to forgotten history, 
for the most part, but as time is counted in history, it is 
not long since the judges of the Old Bailey condemned 
young girls to death for stealing a few ribbons or hand¬ 
kerchiefs, and my own grandfather saw their executions, 
in batches. 


76 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

But on the last day of the Old Bailey, when the police 
were withdrawn from Its courtroom and corridors, before 
Its furniture and fittings were to be put up for public 
auction, the crowd I met there did not remember those 
old ruthless days. They were the criminals of a later 
generation who had been put In the cells as “drunks and 
disorderlies,” as pickpockets and “petty larcenies,” 
brought up for judgment with the knowledge that short 
sentences would be inflicted on them. 

It was one of the most remarkable crowds I have ever 
seen. Some queer sentiment had brought all these crooks 
and jailbirds to see the last of their old “home.” Frowzy 
women and “flash” girls, old scamps of the casual ward 
and doss house, habitual drunkards, and young thieves, 
sporting touts and burglars of the Bill Sikes brand, had 
gathered together, as though by special Invitation, to 
the “private view.” Laughing, excited, full of loquacious 
reminiscences, they wandered through the charge room 
and the cells where they had been “lagged,” pointed out 
the cell from which Jack Sheppard had escaped, and other 
cells once Inhabited by famous murderers and criminals, 
and surged Into the great court where they had stood In 
the dock facing the scarlet-robed judge and all the maj¬ 
esty of law. They stood In the dock again, lots of them, 
jeering, with bursts of hoarse laughter at the merry jest. 

They crowded up to the judge’s throne. One young 
coster, with a gift of mimicry, put on a judicial manner, 
wagged his head solemnly, and sentenced his pals to death. 
Shrieks of laughter greeted his pantomime. An old 
ruffian with a legal-looking face, sodden with drink, 
played the part of prosecuting counsel, addressed an 
Imaginary judge as “M’lud,” the crowd as “gentlemen 
of the jury,” and asserted that the evidence was over¬ 
whelming as to the guilt of the prisoner, who was indeed 
“a naughty, naughty man.” 

“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 

77 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

truth I” screamed a girl with big feathers in her hat, and 
she laughed hysterically at her own humor. 

There was something grim and tragic beneath the 
comedy of the scene. This travesty of the law by those 
who had been in its clutches revealed a vicious psychology 
lost to all shame and decency, but was also a condemna¬ 
tion of society which produced such types of men and 
women, for the most part victims of slum life, foul sur¬ 
roundings, and evil upbringing, tolerated, and indeed 
created, by the social system of England. It needed the 
pen of Dickens to describe this scene, and truly it was a 
hark-back to the days of Dickens himself. I was 
astounded that such characters as Bill Sikes, Old Fagin 
and Nancy, and Charley Bates should still remain in the 
London of Edward VII, as they appeared in the living 
image that day in the Old Bailey. 

I wandered upstairs into deserted rooms. They were 
strewn with papers ankle-deep, and on the table I saw a 
bulky volume, bound in iron, which was the old charge 
book, dating from 1730. To this day I regret that I 
did not “pinch” it, for it was an historic relic which, with 
scandalous carelessness, was thrown away. But I was 
afraid of carrying off such a big thing, lest I should find 
myself on a more modern charge-sheet at another court. 
I did, however, stuff a number of papers into my pockets, 
and when I reached home and examined them, I found 
that they were also historical documents of great interest. 

One of them, for instance, was a list of eighty con¬ 
victs, or so, condemned to penal servitude and transporta¬ 
tion to Botany Bay. Many of them—boys and girls— 
had been sentenced to death for the crime of stealing a 
few potatoes, a pinafore, some yards of cotton, or, in 
one case, for breaking a threshing machine, and had been 
“graciously reprieved by His Majesty King William IV” 
and condemned to that ferocious punishment of penal 
servitude in the convict settlements of Australia, which 

78 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

to many of them was a living death, until by flogging, 
and insanitary conditions, and disease, death itself re¬ 
leased them. That was but a few years before the reign 
of Queen Victoria! 

It was in the new Old Bailey, very handsomely paneled, 
nicely warmed, lighted with delicate effects of color 
through high windows—doubtless the clerks of the court 
thought it quite a privilege for the criminals to be judged 
in such a place—that I saw the trial of that famous and 
astonishing little murderer. Doctor Crippen. 

It will be remembered that he was captured on a ship 
bound for Halifax, with a girl named Ethel le Neve, 
dressed up in boy’s clothes, with whom he had eloped 
after killing his wife and dissecting her body for burial 
in his cellar. 

Crippen looked a respectable little man, with weak, 
watery eyes and a drooping moustache, so ordinary a type 
of middle-class business man in London that quite a num¬ 
ber of people, including one of my own friends, were 
arrested by mistake for him when the hue and cry went 
forth. 

I was at Bournemouth at that time, in one of the 
aviation meetings which were held in the early days of 
flying. It was celebrated by fancy fetes, open-air car¬ 
nivals, fancy-dress balls, and all kinds of diversions. The 
most respectable town in England, inhabited mostly by 
retired colonels, well-to-do spinsters, and invalids, seemed 
to take leave of its senses in a wild outburst of frivolity. 
Even the Mayor was to be seen in the broad glare of 
sunshine, wearing a false nose. Into that atmosphere of 
false noses and fancy frocks came telegrams to several 
newspaper correspondents from their editors. 

“Scotland Yard believes Crippen at Bournemouth. 
Please get busy.” 

That was the tenor of the telegram sent to me, and 
I saw by the pink envelopes received by friends at table 

79 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

in the Grand Hotel one night that they had received 
similar messages. One by one they stole out, looking 
mightily secretive—in search of Crippen, who, by that 
time was nearing Halifax. 

With a friend named Harold Ashton, a well-known 
“crime sleuth,” I went into the hall, and after a slight 
discussion decided that if Crippen was in Bournemouth 
it was not our job to find him. We were, for the time, 
experts in aviation, and couldn’t be put off by foolish 
murders. 

As we went upstairs, Ashton put his head over the 
banisters, and then uttered an exclamation. 

“Scotland Yard I” 

Looking over the stair rail, I saw a pair of boots, 
belonging to a man sitting in the hall. True enough, they 
had come from Scotland Yard, according to the tradition 
which enables any detective to be recognized at a glance 
by any criminal. One of those detectives had been sent 
down on the false rumor, and probably hoped to find 
Doctor Crippen and Ethel le Neve disguised as Pierrot 
and Columbine on the pier. 

Ashton and I decided to have a game with the man. 
We wrote a note in block letters, as follows: 

“are you looking for doctor crippen? if so, 

BEWARE I” 

By a small bribe, we hired a boy to deliver It to the 
detective, and then depart quickly. 

The effect was obviously disconcerting to the man, for 
he looked most uneasy, and then hurried out of the hotel. 
Doubtless he could not understand how anybody in 
Bournemouth could know of his mission. Ashton and I 
followed him, and he was immediately aware that he was 
being shadowed. He went into a public house and 
ordered a glass of beer which he did not drink. Ashton 
and I did the same, and were quick on his heels when he 

8 o 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

slipped out by a side door. We kept up this game for 
quite a time, until we tired of it, and to this day the 
detective must wonder who shadowed him so closely in 
Bournemouth, and for what fell purpose. 

Curiously, by the absurd chances of journalistic life, 
I became mixed up in the Crippen case, not only by having 
to describe the trial, but by having to write the life story 
of Ethel le Neve. That girl, who had been Crippen’s 
typist, was quite a pretty and attractive little creature, 
and in spite of her flight with him in boy’s clothes, the 
police were satisfied that she was entirely innocent of the 
murder. Anyhow, she was not charged, and upon her 
liberation she was immediately captured at a price, by 
The Daily Chronicle, who saw that her narrative would 
make an enormous sensation. They provided her with 
a furnished flat, under an assumed name, and for weeks 
The Daily Chronicle office was swarming with her sister’s 
family, while office boys fetched the milk for the baby, 
and sub-editors paid the outstanding debts of the brother- 
in-law, in order that Ethel le Neve should reserve her 
tale exclusively to the nice, kind paper! Such is the 
dignity of modern journalism, desperate for a “scoop.” 

Eddy and I were again associated in the extraction of 
Ethel le Neve’s tale. Eddy, as a young barrister, now 
well-known and prosperous at the Bar, cross-examined 
her artfully, and persistently, with the firm belief that 
she knew all about the murder. Never once, however, 
did he trap her into any admission. 

From my point of view, the psychology of the girl 
was extremely interesting. Just a little Cockney girl, 
from a family of humble class and means, she had aston¬ 
ishing and unusual qualities. It Is characteristic of her 
that when she was staying In Brussels with Crippen, dis¬ 
guised as a boy—and a remarkably good-looking boy she 
appeared—because she knew that Crippen was wanted by 
the law for “some old thing or other,” which she didn’t 

8i 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

bother to find out, she spent most of her time visiting 
the art galleries and museums of the Belgian capital. She 
had regarded the whole episode as a great “lark,” until 
at Halifax detectives came aboard and arrested the fugi¬ 
tives on a charge of murder. She admitted to me that, 
putting two and two together, little incidents that had 
seemed trivial at the time, and remembering queer words 
spoken by Crippen—“the doctor,” as she called him— 
she had no doubt now of his guilt. But, as she also 
admitted, that made no difference to her love for him. 
“He was mad when he did it,” she said, “and he was mad 
for me.” That was the extraordinary thing—that (kep, 
sincere, and passionate love between the little weak-eyed, 
middle-aged quack doctor, and this common, pretty little 
Cockney girl. 

I read Crippen’s love letters, written to Ethel le Neve 
from prison, immensely long letters, written on prison 
paper in a neat little writing, without a blot or a fault. 
All told, there were forty thousand words of them—as 
long as a novel—and they were surprising in their good 
style, their beauty of expression, their resignation to 
death. These two people from the squalor of a London 
suburb,' might have been mediaeval lovers in Italy of 
Boccaccio’s time, when murder for love’s sake was lightly 
done. 

In a little restaurant in Soho I sat with Ethel le Neve, 
day after day, while all the journalists of England were 
searching for her. Many times she was so gay that it 
was impossible to believe that she had escaped the hang¬ 
man’s rope by no great distance, and that her lover was 
a little blear-eyed man lying under sentence of death. 
Yet that gayety of hers was not affected or forced. It 
bubbled out of her because of a quick and childish sense 
of humor, which had not been killed by the frightful 
thing that overshadowed her. When that shadow fell 
upon her spirit again, she used to weep, but never for 

82 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

long. Her last request to me was that I should have 
Doctor Crippen’s photograph made into a miniature 
which she could wear concealed upon her breast. On the 
morning of his execution she put on black for him, and 
wished that she might have died with him on the scaffold. 

I am certain, as the police were, that she was guiltless 
of all knowledge and participation in the murder of Mrs. 
Crippen, but she seemed as careless of that crime as any 
woman of the Borgias when a rival was removed from 
her path of love. Some old strain of passionate blood 
had thrust up again in this London typist girl, whose 
name of le Neve might hold the clue, if we knew her 
family history, to this secret of her personality. 

I was glad to see the last of her, having written down 
her tale, because that was not the kind of journalism 
which appealed to my instincts or ideals, and I sickened 
at the squalor of the whole story of love and murder, 
as I sat with Ethel le Neve in friendly discourse, not 
without pity for this girl whose life had been ruined by 
her folly, and who would be forever haunted by the grim 
tragedy of Crippen’s crime. 


83 


VII 


A lthough my reminiscences hitherto have dealt 
with my adventures as a special correspondent, I 
have from time to time sat with assumed dignity in the 
editorial chair. Indeed, I was an editor before I was 
twenty-one, and I may say that I began life very high 
up in the world and have been climbing down steadily 
ever since. 

I was at least very high up—on the top floor of the 
House of Cassell, in La Belle Sauvage Yard—when I 
assumed, at the age of nineteen, the enormous title of 
Educational Editor, and gained the microscopic salary of 
a hundred and twenty pounds a year. 

With five pounds capital and that income, I married, 
with an audacity which I now find superb. I was so 
young, and looked so much younger, that I did not dare 
to confess my married state to my official chief, who was 
the Right Honorable H. O. Arnold-Forster, in whose 
room I sat, and one day when my wife popped her head 
through the door and said “Hullo I” I made signs to her 
to depart. 

“Who’s that pretty girl?” asked Arnold-Forster, and 
with shame I must confess that I hid the secret of our 
relationship. 

That first chief of mine was one of the most extraor¬ 
dinary men I ever met, and quite the rudest to all people 
of superior rank to himself. 

As Secretary to the Admiralty, and afterward Minister 
of War, many important visitors used to call on him in 
his big room at the top of Cassell’s, where he was one 
of the Directors. I sat opposite, correcting proofs of 

^4 




ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

school books and advertisements, writing fairy tales in 
spare moments, and listening to Arnold-Forster’s con¬ 
versation. He treated distinguished admirals, generals, 
and colonels as though they were office boys, so that they 
perspired in his presence, and were sometimes deeply 
affronted, but, on the other hand, as a proof of chivalry, 
he treated office boys and printers’ devils as though they 
were distinguished admirals, generals, and colonels, with 
a most particular courtesy. 

I saw him achieve the almost incredible feat of dictat¬ 
ing a complete history of England as he paced up and 
down his room, with hardly a note. It is true that his 
patient secretary had to fill in the dates afterward, and 
verify the “facts,” which were often wrong, but the result 
was certainly the most vivid and illuminating history of 
England ever written for young people, and Rudyard 
Kipling wrote to him that it was one of the few books 
that had kept him out of bed all night. 

To me Arnold-Forster was the soul of kindness, and 
encouraged me to write my first book, “Founders of the 
Empire,” which is still selling in English schools, after 
twenty years, though I make no profit thereby. 

At twenty-three years of age, I heard of a new job, 
and applied for it. It was the position of managing 
editor of the Tillotsons’ Literary Syndicate, in the North 
of England. The audacity of my application alarmed 
me as I wrote the letter, and I excused myself, as I remem¬ 
ber, in the final sentence. “As Pitt said,” I wrote, “I 
am guilty of the damnable crime of being a Young Man.” 

That sentence gained me the position, as I afterward 
heard. The Tillotsons were three young brothers who 
believed in youth. They were amused and captured by 
that phrase of mine. So I went North for a time, with 
my young wife. 

It was a great experience in the market of literary 
wares. My task was to buy fiction and articles for syn- 

35 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

dicating in the provincial and colonial press, and my judg¬ 
ment was put to test of the sales list. 

I “spotted” some winners who are now famous. Among 
them I remember was Arnold Bennett. He sent In a story 
called “The Grand Babylon Hotel”—his first romance— 
and I read It with the conviction that It was first-class 
melodrama. He asked a paltry price, which I accepted, 
and then I asked him to lunch In London—the joy of see¬ 
ing London again!—and made him an offer for the book 
rights. He agreed to that fee, but afterward, when the 
book was Immensely successful, he grieved over his bad 
bargain, and In one of his later books he warned all 
authors against a pale-faced young man, with his third 
finger deeply stained by nicotine, who had a habit of ask¬ 
ing authors to lunch and robbing them over the coffee 
cups. Later In life he forgave me. 

Although I had hard work as editor In Bolton of the 
Black Country—the city was ugly, but the people kind— 
It was there that I found my pen, and whatever quality 
It has. 

I wrote an Immense number of articles on every kind 
of subject, to be syndicated In the provincial press, and 
I made a surprising success with a weekly essay called 
“Knowledge Is Power.” Like Francis Bacon, “I took all 
knowledge for my province” by “swotting up” the great 
masters of drama, poetry, novels, essays, philosophy, and 
art. It was my own education, condensed Into short 
essays, written with the simplicity, sincerity, and enthusi¬ 
asm of youth, for people with less chances than myself. 
I began to get letters from all parts of the earth, partly 
for the reason that the articles appeared In The Weekly 
Scotsmanf among other papers, which goes wherever a 
Scottish heart beats. Correspondents confided in me, as 
in an old wise man—the secrets of their lives, their hopes 
and ambitions, their desire to know the strangest and 
quaintest things. Old ladles sent me cakes, flowers, and 

86 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

innumerable verses. Young men asked me how they 
could become the Lord Mayor’s coachman (that was an 
actual question!), or find the way to Heaven. 

Meanwhile Fleet Street called to me with an alluring 
voice. Kind as the people were to me in Bolton—beyond 
all words kind—I sickened for London. One night I 
wrote a letter to Alfred Harmsworth, founder of The 
Daily Mail, and afterward Lord Northcliffe. Almost 
by return post he asked me to call on him, and I took 
the chance. 

I remember as though it were yesterday my first inter¬ 
view with that genius of the new journalism. He kept 
me waiting for a while in an antechamber of Carmelite 
House. Young men, extremely well dressed, and ob¬ 
viously in a great hurry on business of enormous impor¬ 
tance to themselves, kept coming and going. Messenger 
boys in neat little liveries bounced in and out of the 
“Chief’s” room, in answer to his bell. Presently one of 
them approached me and said, “Your turn.” I drew a 
deep breath, prayed for courage, and found myself face 
to face with a handsome, clean-shaven, well-dressed man, 
with a lock of brown hair falling over his broad forehead, 
and a friendly, quizzical look in his brown eyes. 

Sitting back in a deep chair, smoking a cigar, he read 
some of the articles I had brought, and occasionally said 
“Not bad!” or “Rather amusing!” Once he looked up 
and said, “You look rather pale, young man. Better go 
to the South of France for a bit.” 

But it was the air of Fleet Street I wanted. 

Presently he gave me the chance of it. 

“How would you like to edit Page Four, and write 
two articles a week?” 

I went out of Carmelite House with that offer accepted, 
uplifted to the seventh heaven of hope, and yet a little 
scared by the dangerous and dazzling height which I had 
reached. 


87 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

A month later, having uprooted my home in the North, 
brought a wife and babe to London, incurred heavy 
expenses with a mortgage on the future, I presented my¬ 
self at The Daily Mail again, and awaited the leisure and 
pleasure of Alfred Harmsworth. 

When I was shown into his room, he only dimly remem¬ 
bered my face. 

“Let me see,” he said, groping back to the distant past, 
which was four weeks old. 

When I told him my name, he seemed to have a glim¬ 
mer of some half-forgotten compact. 

“Oh, yes! The young man from the North. . . . 
Wasn’t there some talk of making a place for you in The 
Daily Mail?^* 

My heart fell down a precipice. ... I mentioned the 
offer that had been made and accepted. But Harms¬ 
worth looked a little doubtful. 

“Page Four? Well, hardly that, perhaps. I’ve ap¬ 
pointed another editor.” 

I thought of my wife and babe, and unpaid bills. 

“Do you mind touching the bell?” asked Harmsworth. 

The usual boy came in, and was ordered to send down 
a certain gentleman whose name I did not hear. Pres¬ 
ently the door opened, and a tall, thin, pale, handsome, 
and extremely haughty young gentleman sauntered in 
and said “Good afternoon,” icily. 

Harmsworth presented me to Filson Young, whom 
afterward I came to know as one of the most brilliant 
writers in Fleet Street, as he still remains. Not then did 
I guess that we should meet as chroniclers of world war 
in the ravaged fields of France. 

“Oh, Young,” said Harmsworth, in his suavest voice, 
“this is a newcomer, named Philip Gibbs. I half prom¬ 
ised him the editorship of Page Four.” 

Here he tapped Young on the shoulder, and added in 
a jocular way: 


88 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

“And if you’re not very careful, young man, he may 
edit Page Four I” 

Young offered me a cold hand, and there was not a 
benediction in his glance. I was put under his orders as 
a writer, as heir presumptive to his throne. As it hap¬ 
pened, we became good friends, and he had no grudge 
against me when, some months later, he vacated the chair 
in my favor and went to Ireland for The Daily Mail, to 
collect material for his brilliant essays on “Ireland at the 
Crossroads.” 

So there I was, in the Harmsworth regime, which has 
made many men, and broken others. It was the great 
school of the new journalism, which was very new in Eng¬ 
land of those days, and mainly inspired by the powerful, 
brilliant, erratic, and whimsical genius of Alfred Harms¬ 
worth himself. 

I joined his staff at the end of the Boer War period, 
when there was a brilliant group of men on The Daily 
Mail, such as Charles Hands, Edgar Wallace, H. W. 
Wilson, Holt White, and Filson Young. The editor was 
“Tom” Marlowe, still by a miracle in that position, which 
he kept through years of turbulence and change, by carry¬ 
ing out with unfaltering hesitation every wish and whim- 
sey of The Chief, and by a sense of humor which never 
betrayed him into regarding any internal convulsion, revo¬ 
lution, or hysteria of The Daily Mail system as more 
than the latest phase in an ever-changing game. Men 
might come, and men might go, but Marlowe remained 
forever, bluff, smiling, imperturbable, and kind. 

Above him in power of direction, dynamic energy, and 
financial authority, was Kennedy Jones, whom all men 
feared and many hated. He had a ruthless brutality of 
speech and action which Harmsworth, more human, more 
generous, and less cruel (though he had a strain of 
cruelty), found immensely helpful in running an organiza¬ 
tion which could not succeed on sentiment or brotherly 

89 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

love. Kennedy Jones would break a man as soon as look 
at him, if he made a mistake “letting down” the paper, 
if he earned more money for a job which could be done 
for less by a younger man, if he showed signs of getting 
tired. That was his deliberate policy as a “strong man” 
out to win at any price, but, as in most men of the kind, 
there lay beneath his ruthlessness a substratum of human 
quality which occasionally revealed itself in friendly 
action. He had a cynical honesty of outlook on life, 
which gave his conversation at times the hard sparkle of 
wit and the bitter spice of truth. Beyond any doubt, the 
enormous success of the Northcliffe press, as it was after¬ 
ward called, owed a great deal to the business genius 
of this man. 

Alfred Harmsworth himself provided the ideas, the 
policy, the spirit of the machine. He was the enthusiast, 
the explorer, and the adventurer, with the world’s news 
as his uncharted seas. He had only one test of what 
was good to print, “Does this interest Me?” As he was 
interested, with the passionate curiosity of a small boy 
who asks continually “How?” and “Why?”, in all the 
elementary aspects of human life, in its romances and dis¬ 
coveries, its new toys and new fads, its tragedies and 
comedies of the more obvious kind, its melodramas and 
amusements and personalities, that test was not narrow 
or one-eyed. The legend grew that Harmsworth, after¬ 
ward Northcliffe, had an uncanny sense of public opinion, 
and, with his ear to the ground, knew from afar what 
the people wanted, and gave it to them. But, in my 
judgment, he had none of that subtlety of mind and 
vision. He had a boyish simplicity, overlaid by a little 
cunning and craft. It was not what the public wanted that 
was his guiding rule. It was what he wanted. His luck 
and genius lay in the combination of qualities which made 
him typical to a supreme degree of the average man, as 
produced by the triviality, the restlessness, the craving for 

90 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

sensation, the desire to escape from boredom, the im¬ 
patience with the length and dullness and difficulty of life 
and learning, the habit of taking short cuts to knowledge 
and judgment, which characterized that great middle- 
class public of the world before the war. 

One method by which Harmsworth impressed his own 
views and character on the staff and paper was to hold a 
daily conference in The Daily Mail office, which all 
editors, sub-editors, reporters, special correspondents, and 
glorified office boys were expected to attend. Freedom 
of speech was granted, and free discussion invited, with¬ 
out distinction of rank. The man who put a good idea 
into the pool was rewarded by Harmsworth’s enthusiastic 
approbation, while he himself criticized that day’s paper, 
pointed out its defects, praised some article which had 
caught his fancy, and discussed the leading matter for 
next day’s paper. Cigarettes and cigars lay ready to the 
hand. Tea was served, daintily. Laughter and jokes 
brightened this daily rendezvous, and Harmsworth, at 
these times, in those early days, was at his best—easy, 
boyish, captivating, to some extent inspiring. But it was 
an inspiration in the triviality of thought, in the lighter 
side of the Puppet Show. Never once did I hear Harms¬ 
worth utter one serious commentary on life, or any word 
approaching nobility of thought, or any hint of some deep 
purpose behind this engine which he was driving with 
such splendid zest in its power and efficiency. On the 
other hand, I never heard him say a base word or utter 
an unclean or vicious thought. 

He was very generous at times to those who served 
him. I know one man who approached him for a loan 
of £ioo. 

He was shocked at the idea. 

“Certainly not I Don’t you know that I never lend 
money? I wouldn’t do it if you were starving in the 
gutter.” 


91 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Then he wrote a cheque for £ioo, and said, “But I’ll 
give it to you, my dear fellow. Say no more about it.” 

Now and again, when he saw one of his “young men” 
looking pale and run down, he would pack him off for a 
holiday in the South of France, with all his expenses paid. 
In later years he gave handsome pensions to many who 
had served him in the early days. 

He had his court favorites, like the mediaeval kings, 
generally one of the newcomers who had aroused his 
enthusiasm by some little “scoop,” or a brilliant bit of 
work. But he tired of them quickly, and it was a danger¬ 
ous thing to occupy that position, because it was almost 
certain to mean a speedy fall. 

For a little while I was one of his favorites. He used 
to chat with me in his room and say amusing, indiscreet 
things, about other members of the staff, or his numerous 
brothers. 

I remember his looking up once from his desk where 
he sat in front of a bust of Napoleon, to whom he bore 
a physical resemblance, and upon whose character and 
methods with men he closely modeled himself. 

“Gibbs,” he said, “whenever you see a man looking 
like a codfish walking about these passages, you’ll know 
my brother Cecil brought him in. Then he comes to me 
to hoik him out again!” 

As temporary favorite, I was invited down to Sutton 
Court, a magnificent old mansion of Elizabethan days, in 
Surrey. It was in the early days of motoring, and I was 
taken down in a great car, and back in another, and felt 
like an emperor. Harmsworth was a delightful host, and 
kept open house during the week-ends, where one heard 
the latest newspaper “shop” under the high timbered 
roof and between the paneled walls, where the great ladies 
and gentlemen of England, in silks and brocades, had 
dined and danced by candlelight. 

It was here, in the minstrels’ gallery, one afternoon, 

92 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

that Harmsworth asked me to tell him all about “syn¬ 
dicating,” according to my experience with the Tillotsons’ 
syndicate. I told him, and he became excited. 

“Excellent I I tell you what to do. Go back to The 
Daily Mail and say I’ve sacked you. Then go to the 
South of France with your wife, for three months. I’ll 
pay expenses. After that, return to Fleet Street, where 
you’ll find an office waiting for you, called ‘the British 
Empire Syndicate, Limited.’ Nobody must know that 
I’m behind it. . . . How’s that for a scheme?” 

It seemed to me a pretty good scheme, although I was 
doubtful whether I could work it. I temporized, and 
suggested drawing out the scheme on paper, more in 
detail. That disappointed him. He wanted me to say, 
“Rather! The chance of a life time!” My hesitation 

put me Into the class he called, “Yes, but-” I drew 

up the scheme, but he went for a visit to Germany, and 
on his return did not give another thought to the “British 
Empire Syndicate, Limited.” Other ideas had absorbed 
his Interest. 

At the end of a year I saw I was losing favor. An 
Incident happened which forewarned me of approaching 
doom. He had returned from another visit to Germany, 
and was in a bad temper, believing, as he always did, that 
The Daily Mail had gone to the dogs in his absence. He 
reproved me sharply for the miserable stuff I had been 
publishing in Page Four, and demanded to see what I 
had got in hand. 

I took down some “plums”—special articles by bril¬ 
liant and distinguished men- He glanced through them, 
and laid them down angrily. 

“Dull as ditchwater 1 Send them all back 1” 

I protested that it was Impossible to send them back, 
as they were all commissioned. My own honor and 
honesty were at stake. 

“Send them all back!” he said, with Increasing anger. 

93 



ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I did not send them back, but gave them “snappier” 
titles. The next day he sent for me again, and demanded 
to see what else I proposed to publish—“not that trash 
you showed me yesterday I” 

I took down the same articles, with some others. He 
had more leisure, read them while he smoked a cigar, and 
at intervals said, “Good!” . . . “Excellent!” . . . 
“Why didn’t you show these to me yesterday?” 

Needless to say, I did not enlighten him. I was saved 
that time, but a few months later I saw other signs of 
disfavor. 

I remember that at that time I had to see General 
Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, that grand 
old man for whose humanity and love I had a great re¬ 
spect, in spite of his methods of conversion, with scarlet 
coats and tambourines. He was angry with something 
I had written, and was violent in his wrath. But then 
he forgave me and talked very gently and wisely of the 
responsibilities of journalism, “the greatest power in the 
world for good or evil.” 

Presently the old man seized me by the wrist with his 
skinny old hand, and thrust me down on to my knees. 

“Now let us pray for Alfred Harmsworth,” he said, 
and offered up fervent prayer for his wisdom and light. 

I don’t know what effect that prayer had on Harms¬ 
worth, but it seemed to have an immediate effect upon my 
own fate. I was “sacked” from The Daily Mail. 


/ 


94 


VIII 


AFTER my time on The Daily Mail, I joined The 
l\. Daily Express for a few months before becoming 
one of the literary editors of The Daily Chronicle. 

On The Express I came to know Sir Arthur Pearson 
before the days of his blindness, and did not admire him 
so much then (though I liked him) as in those later years 
when, by his magnificent courage, and his devoted service 
to all the blinded men of the war, he was one of the truly 
heroic figures of the world. 

As a newspaper proprietor he was a man of restless 
energy, but narrower in his outlook, at that time, than 
his great rival, Harmsworth, whose methods he imitated. 
He was a strong adherent of tariff reform, when Joseph 
Chamberlain stumped the country in favor of that policy, 
which divided friend from friend, wrecked the amenities 
of social life, and started passionate arguments at every 
dinner table, somewhat in the same manner that the per¬ 
sonality and policy of President Wilson caused social 
uproar in the United States, during the Peace Conference. 

Pearson conferred on me the privilege, as I think he 
considered it, of recording the progress of the Chamber- 
lain campaign, and it was the hardest work, I think, apart 
from war correspondence, that I have ever done. I do 
not regret having done it, for it took me into the midst 
of one of the biggest political conflicts in English history, 
led by one of the most remarkable men. 

My task was to write each night what is called' “a 
descriptive report,” which means that I had to give the 
gist of each of Chamberlain’s long speeches, with their 
salient points, and at the same time describe the scenes 

95 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

in and around the hall, besieged everywhere by vast 
crowds of opponents and supporters who often came into 
conflict, Chamberlain’s methods with his interrupters, 
and the incidents of the evening. Pearson often had a 
place on the platform, near the man for whom he had a 
real hero worship, and sent down little notes to me when 
various points of importance occurred to him. Always 
my article had to be finished within a few minutes of 
Chamberlain’s peroration, in order to get it on to the 
wire for London. 

It was at Newport, in Wales, I remember, that I 
nearly blighted my young life by over-sympathy with the 
sufferings of a fellow mortal. This was a correspondent 
of The Daily Mail, who had been a most convinced and 
passionate free trader. He had written, only a few 
weeks before, a series of powerful and crushing articles 
against tariff reform, which had duly appeared in The 
Daily Mail, until Harmsworth announced one morning 
that he had been talking to his gardener, and had decided 
that tariff reform would be a good thing for England. 
It would be, therefore, the policy of The Daily Mail. 

By a refinement of cruelty which I am sure he did not 
realize, his free trade agent was sent down to reveal the 
glories of tariffs, as expounded by Chamberlain. It went 
sorely to the conscience of this Scot, who asked me plain¬ 
tively, “How can I resign—with wife and bairns?” At 
Newport his distress was acute, owing to the immense 
reception of Chamberlain by crowds so dense that one 
could have walked over their mass, which was one solid 
block along the line of route. 

Before the speech that night he stood me a bottle of 
wine, which we shared, and he wept over this red liquid 
at the abomination of tariffs, the iniquity of The Daily 
Mail, and the conscience of a correspondent. What that 
wine was, I cannot tell. It was certainly some dreadful 
kind of poison. I had drunk discreetly, but upon entering 

96 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the hall, I felt a weight on my head like the dome of St. 
Paul’s, and saw the great audience spinning round like 
an immense revolving Face. For two hours’ agony I 
listened to Chamberlain’s speech on tin plates, wrote 
things I could not read, and at the end of the meeting, 
having thrust my stuff over the counter of the telegraph 
office, collapsed, and was very ill. I heard afterward that 
the free trade Scot was equally prostrate, but he survived, 
and in course of time became more easy in his conscience, 
and a Knight of the British Empire. 

Toward the end of the campaign I saw that Joseph 
Chamberlain was breaking. I watched him closely, and 
saw signs of mental and physical paralysis creeping over 
him. Other people were watching him, with more 
anxiety. Mrs. Chamberlain was always on the platform, 
by his side, in every town, and her face revealed her own 
nervous strain. Chamberlain, “Our Joe,” as his fol¬ 
lowers called him, lost the wonderful lucidity of his 
speech. At times he hesitated, and fumbled over the 
thread of his thought. When he was heckled, instead 
of turning round in his old style with a rapid, knock-out 
retort, he paused, became embarrassed, or stood silent 
with a strange and tragic air of bewilderment. It was 
pitiful toward the end. The strongest force in England 
was spent and done. The knowledge that his campaign 
had failed, that his political career was broken, as well 
as the immense fatigue he had undergone, and the intense 
effort of his persuasive eloquence, snapped his nerve and 
vitality. He was stricken, like President Wilson, one 
night, and never recovered. 

In that campaign Chamberlain converted me against 
himself on the subject of tariff reform, but I learned to 
admire the courage, and hard sledge-hammer oratory of 
this great Imperialist leader who represented the old 
jingo strain of Victorian England, in its narrow patriot¬ 
ism and rather brutal intolerance, ennobled, to some ex- 

97 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

tent, by old loyalties and traditions belonging to the senti¬ 
ment of the British folk. The very name of Joseph 
Chamberlain seems remote now in English history, and 
the mentality of the English people has outgrown thar 
time when he was fired by that wave of Imperialism 
which overtook the country and produced the genius of 
Kipling, the aggressive idealism of Cecil Rhodes, and 
the Boer War, with its adventures, its Call of the Wild, 
its stupidity, its blatant vulgarity, its jolly good fellows, 
its immense revelation of military incompetence, and its 
waste of blood and treasure. 

After that campaign, I displeased Arthur Pearson by 
a trivial difference of opinion. He believed firmly that 
Bacon wrote “Shakespeare.” I believed just as firmly 
that he didn’t. When he asked me to write up some new 
aspect of that argument, I flatly refused, and Pearson 
was very much annoyed. A little later I resigned my 
position, and for some time he did not forgive me. But 
years later we met again, and he was generous and kind 
in the words he spoke about my work. It was out in 
France, when he visited the war correspondents’ mess 
and went with us into Peronne after its capture by our 
troops. He was blind, but more cheerful than when I 
had known him in his sighted days. At least he had 
gained a miraculous victory over his tragic loss, and 
would not let it weaken him. That day in Peronne 
he walked into the burning ruins, touched the walls of 
shattered houses, listened to the silence there, broken 
by the sound of a gun or two, and the whirr of an aer¬ 
oplane overhead. He saw more than I did, and his de¬ 
scription afterward was full of detail and penetrating in 
its vision. 

We met again, after the war, at a dinner in New York, 
when he spoke of the work of St. Dunstan’s, which he 
had founded for blinded men. It was one of the most 
beautiful speeches I have ever heard—I think the most 

98 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

beautiful—and there was not one of us there, in a gather¬ 
ing of American journalists and business men, who did 
not give all the homage in his heart to this great leader 
of the blind. 

As one of the literary editors of The Daily Chronicle^ I 
had a good deal of experience of the inside of newspaper 
life, and, on the whole, some merry times. The hours 
were long, for I used to get to the office shortly after 
ten, and, more often than not, did not leave till midnight. 
Having charge of the magazine page, which at that time 
was illustrated by black and white drawings, I was re¬ 
sponsible for the work of three artists, alleged to be 
tame, but with a strain of wildness at times, which was 
manifested by wrestling bouts, when all of us were found 
writhing on the floor in what looked like a death struggle, 
when the door was opened by the office boy or some less 
distinguished visitor. One of them was Edgar Lander, 
generally known as “Uncle” in the Press Club, and in 
Bohemian haunts down Chelsea way. Endowed with a 
cynical sense of humor, a gift for lightning repartee 
which dealt knock-out blows with the sure touch of 
Carpentier, and a prodigious memory for all the char« 
acters of fiction in modern and classical works, he gave a 
good lead to conversation in the large room over the 
clock in Fleet Street where we had our workshop. An¬ 
other of the artists was Alfred Priest, afterward well 
known as a portrait painter, and three times infamous 
in the Royal Academy as the painter of “the picture of the 
year.” He was, and is, a philosophical and argumenta¬ 
tive soul, and Lander and he used to trail their coats 
before each other, in a metaphorical way, with enormous 
conversational results, which sometimes ended in vio¬ 
lence on both sides. The third artist, nominally under 
my control, but like the others, entirely out of it, was 
Stephen Reid, whom I have always regarded as a master 
craftsman of the black and white art, which he has low 

99 


) ^ 
> A ^ 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

abandoned for historical painting. A shrewd Scotsman 
also with a lively sense of humor, he kept the balance 
between his two colleagues, and roared with laughter at 
both of them. 

We were demons for work, although we talked so 
much, and the page we produced day by day was, by 
general consensus of opinion, I think, the best of its kind 
in English journalism. We gave all our time and all our 
energy to the job, and I suppose there are few editors in 
the world, and few artists, who have ever been seen 
staggering down Fleet Street, as once Alfred Priest and 
myself might have been observed, one midnight, carrying 
a solid block of metal weighing something like half a hun¬ 
dredweight, in order that our page might appear next 
day. That was a full-page block with text and pictures, 
representing some great floods in England in which we 
had been wading all day. We were so late in getting back 
with our work that the only chance of getting it into 
the paper was to act as porters from the blockmakers to 
The Daily Chronicle press. We nearly broke our backs, 
but if it had been too late for the paper we should have 
broken our hearts. Such is the enthusiasm of youth—ill 
rewarded in this case, as in others, because the three 
artists were sacked when black and white drawings gave 
way to photography. Afterward Edgar Lander of my 
“three musketeers” lost the use of his best arm in the 
Great War, where, by his old name of “Uncle” and the 
rank of Captain, he served in France, and gave the gift 
of laughter to his crowd. 

In those good old days of The Daily Chronicle, long 
before the war, there was a considerable sporting spirit, 
inspired by the news editor, Ernest Perris, who is now 
the managing editor, with greater gravity. Perris, un¬ 
doubtedly the best news editor in London, was very 
human in quiet times, although utterly inhuman, or rather, 
superhuman, when there was a “world scoop” in progress. 

100 


i c 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

It was he who challenged Littlewood, the dramatic critic, 
to a forty-mile walk for a £io bet, and afterward, at 
the same price, anybody who cared to join in. I was 
foolishly beguiled into that adventure, when six of us 
set out one morning at six o’clock, from the Marble Arch 
to Aylesbury—a measured forty miles. We were all 
utterly untrained, and “Robin” Littlewood, the dramatic 
critic, singularly like Will Shakespeare in form and figure, 
refused to let his usual hearty appetite interfere with 
his athletic contest. It was a stop for five-o’clock tea 
which proved his undoing, for although he arrived at 
Aylesbury, he was third in the race, so losing his £io, 
and was violently sick in the George Inn. Perris was an 
easy first, and I was a bad second. I remember that 
at the thirtieth mile I became dazed and silly, and was 
seen by people walking like a ghost and singing the nur¬ 
sery rhymes of childhood. That night when the six 
returned by train to London, they were like old, old 
men, and so crippled that I, for one, had to be carried 
up the steps of Baker Street Station. 

Another hobby of Perris’s was amateur boxing, and I 
had an office reputation of knowing something of the 
science of that art, as I had a young brother who boxed 
for Oxford. 

Perris, after various sparring bouts in which he had 
given bloody noses to sub-editors and others, challenged 
In mortal combat my friend Eddy, whom I have already 
introduced In this narrative. There had been some tem¬ 
peramental passages between the news editor and this 
young writer, so that, If the conflict took place, it would 
be lively. I acted as Eddy’s second In the matter, and 
assuming Immense scientific knowledge, coached him as 
to the right methods of attack. At least I urged upon 
him the necessity of aggressive action In the first round, 
because If he once gave Perris a chance of hitting out, 
Eddy would certainly be severely damaged, for Perris 

lOI 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

is a big man with a clean-shaven face of a somewhat 
pugilistic type, and with a large-sized fist. 

This little meeting between the news editor and his 
chief reporter aroused considerable interest in the office, 
and some betting. Quite a little crowd had collected in 
the sub-editorial room for the event. It was not of long 
duration. At the words, “Time, gentlemen,” Eddy, 
heroic as any man inspired by anxiety, made an immediate 
assault upon Perris, like a swift over-arm bowler, and by 
a fluke of chance, landed the news editor a fearful blow 
on the head. It dazed him, but Eddy was not to be 
denied, and continued his attack with the ferocity of a 
man-eating tiger, until Perris collapsed. . . . After that, 
with greedy appetite for blood, he made mincemeat of 
a young man named “Boy” Jones, who asked for trouble 
and got it. 

These little episodes behind the scenes of life in Fleet 
Street kept up the spirits and humor of men who, as a 
rule, worked hard and long each day, and were always 
at the mercy of the world’s news, which sent them off 
upon strange errands in the Street of Adventure, or tied 
them to the desk, like slaves of the galleys. 

My next experience in editorship was when I was 
appointed literary editor of a new daily paper called 
The Tribune, the history of which is one of the romantic 
tragedies of Fleet Street. 

Its founder and proprietor was a very tall, handsome, 
and melancholy young man named Franklin Thomasson, 
who came from that city of Bolton in the Black Country 
where I had been managing editor of the Tillotson Syn¬ 
dicate. He had the misfortune of being one of the richest 
young men in England, as the son of an old cotton spinner 
who had built up the largest cotton mills in Lancashire. 
It was, I believe, a condition of his will that his son 
should establish a London journal in the Liberal interest. 
Anyhow, Franklin Thomasson, who was an idealist of 

J02 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

that faith, started The Tribune as a kind of sacred duty 
which he had inherited with his money. He appointed 
as his editor-in-chief a worthy old journalist of an old- 
fashioned type, named William Hill, who had previously 
been a news editor of The Westminster Gazette^ an 
excellent evening paper with only one defect—it did not 
publish news. At least, it was not for any kind of news 
that people bought it, but entirely for the political phi¬ 
losophy of its editor, J. A. Spender, who was the High 
Priest of the Liberal Faith, and for the brilliant cartoons 
of “F.C.G.,” who did more to kill Chamberlain and 
tariffs than any other power in England. 

There were many people of knowledge and experience 
who warned Franklin Thomasson of the costly adven¬ 
ture of a new daily paper in London. Augustine Birrell, 
disastrous failure as Chief Secretary for Ireland, but 
distinguished for all time as a genial scholar and essayist, 
was one of them. I went to see him with William Hill, 
and toward the end of the interview, in which he was 
asked to become a kind of literary godfather to the new 
venture, he said to Franklin Thomasson, with a twinkle 
in his eyes, 

“My dear Thomasson, I knew your father, and had a 
high respect for him. For his sake I advise you that if 
you pay £100,000 into my bank as a free gift, and do not 
start The Tribune, you will save a great deal of money!” 

It was a prophecy that was only too truly fulfilled, for 
before Thomasson was through his troubles, he had lost 
£300,000. 

A very brilliant staff of assistant editors and reporters 
was engaged by William Hill—many of the most bril¬ 
liant journalists in England, and some of the worst. 
Among them (I will not say in which category) was my¬ 
self, but at the first assembly of editors before the pub¬ 
lication of the paper, I received a moral shock. 

I encountered a next-door-neighbor of mine, named 

103 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Hawke, who had been a colleague of mine on The Daily 
Chronicle. 

I greeted him with pleasure, and surprise. 

“Hullo, Hawke, what are you doing here?” 

“I’m literary editor,” he said. “What are you?” 

“That’s funny!” I replied. “I happen to be literary 
editor of this paper!” 

William Hill had appointed two literary editors, to be 
perfectly on the safe side. He had also appointed two 
news editors. Whether the two news editors settled the 
dispute by assassination, I do not know. Only one func¬ 
tioned. But Hawke and I agreed to divide the job, 
which we did in the friendliest way, Hawke controlling 
the reviews of books, and I editing the special articles, 
stories, and other literary contents of the paper. 

It was started with a tremendous flourish of trumpets 
in the way of advance publicity. On the first day of 
publication, London was startled by the appearance of 
all the omnibus horses and cart horses caparisoned In 
white sheets bearing the legend “Read The Tribune.** 
Unfortunately it was a wet and stormy day, and before 
an hour or two had passed, the white mantles were splashed 
with many gobs of mud, and waved wildly as dirty rags 
above the backs of the unfortunate animals, or dangled 
dejectedly about their legs. A night or two before pub¬ 
lication, a grand reception was given, regardless of ex¬ 
pense, to an immense gathering of political and literary 
personalities. The walls of The Tribune office were 
entirely covered with hothouse flowers, and baskets of 
orchids hung from the ceilings. Wine flowed like water, 
and historical truth compels me to confess that some 
members of the new staff were overcome by enthusiasm 
for this rich baptism of the new paper. One young 
gentleman, very tall and eloquent, fell as gracefully as 
a lily at the feet of Augustine BIrrell. Another, when 
the guests were gone, resented some fancied Impertinence 

104 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

from the commissionaire, and knocked him through the 
telephone box. One of the office boys, unaccustomed to 
champagne, collapsed in a state of coma and was put in 
the lift for metal plates and carried aloft to the machine 
room. Long after all the guests had gone, and Franklin 
Thomasson himself had returned home, another gentle* 
man in high authority on the organizing side was so 
melted with the happy influences of the evening that his 
heart expanded with human brotherly love for the night 
wanderers of London who had been attracted by the 
lights and music in The Tribune office, and he invited 
them to carry off the baskets of orchids in the hall, as a 
slight token of his affection and sympathy. Indeed, his 
generosity was so unbounded that he made them a gift 
of the hall clock—a magnificent timepiece with chimes 
like St. Paul’s Cathedral—and they were about to depart 
with it, praising God for this benevolence, when Franklin 
Thomasson, who had been summoned back by telephone, 
arrived on the scene to save his property and restore 
discipline. 

It was, of course, only a few Bohemian souls who were 
carried away by the excitement of that baptismal night. 
Generally speaking, the staff of The Tribune was made 
up of men of high and serious character, whose chief 
fault. Indeed, was to err rather much on the side of 
abstract Idealism and the gravity of philosophical faith. 

We produced a paper which was almost too good for 
a public educated In the new journalism of the Harms- 
worth school,' with Its daily sensations. Its snippety ar¬ 
ticles, its “stunt” stories. We were long, and serious, 
and “high-brow,” and—to tell the truth—dull. The 
public utterly refused to buy The Tribune. Nothing that 
we could do would tempt them to buy It. As literary 
editor of special articles and stories, I bought some of 
the most brilliant work of the best writers in England. 
I published one of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories—a 

105 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

gem—but it did not increase the circulation of The 
Tribune by a single copy. I published five chapters of 
autobiography by Joseph Conrad—a literary masterpiece 
—but it did not move the sales. I persuaded G. K. 
Chesterton to contribute a regular article; I published 
the work of many great novelists, and encouraged the 
talent of the younger school; but entirely without success. 
It was desperately disappointing, and I am convinced 
that the main cause of our failure was the surfeit of 
reading matter we gave each day to a public which had 
no leisure for such a mass of print, however good its 
quality. The appearance of the paper, owing to the lack 
of advertisements, was heavy and dull, and any bright 
and light little articles were overshadowed among the 
long, bleak columns. 

A new editor, belonging to the Harmsworth school, a 
charming little man named S. G. Pryor, succeeded Wil¬ 
liam Hill, but his attempts to convert The Tribune into 
a kind of Daily Alail offended our small clientele of 
serious readers, without attracting the great public. 

After two years of disastrous failure, Franklin 
Thomasson, who by that time had lost something like 
£300,000, decided to cut his losses, and the news leaked 
out among his staff of over eight hundred men that the 
ship was sinking. It was a real tragedy for those men 
who had left good jobs to join The Tribune^ and who 
saw themselves faced with unemployment, and even ruin 
and starvation for their wives and families. Some of us 
made desperate endeavors to postpone the sentence of 
death by introducing new capital. 

One of my colleagues journeyed to Dublin in the hope 
of persuading Augustine Birrell to obtain government 
support for this Liberal organ. 

He sent a somewhat startling telegram to Birrell at 
Dublin Castle. 

“The lives of eight hundred men with their wives and 

106 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

children depend on the interview which I beg you to 
grant me to-day.” 

Birrell was surprised, and granted the interview. 

“Mr. Birrell,” said my grave and melancholy friend, 
placing a hat of high and noble architecture on the great 
man’s desk, “is The Tribune going to die?” 

“Sir,” said Mr. Birrell, twinkling through his eye¬ 
glasses, “may The Tribune die that death it so richly 
deserves.” 

I succeeded in holding up the sentence of doom for 
another fortnight, by the sportsmanship of a gallant old 
lady named the Countess of Carlisle. We had been 
conducting a temperance crusade which had earned her 
warm approval, and for the sake of that cause and her 
Liberal idealism, she offered to guarantee the men’s 
wages until the paper might be sold. 

But it was never sold. The fatal night came when 
Franklin Thomasson, white and distressed, but resolute, 
faced his staff with the dreadful announcement that that 
was the last night. One man fainted. Several wept. 
Outside the printers waited in the hope that at this 
twelfth hour some stroke of luck would avert this great 
misfortune. To them it was a question of bread and 
butter for wives and babes. 

That luck stroke did not happen. • 

With several colleagues I waited, smoking and talk¬ 
ing, after the sentence had been pronounced. It seemed 
impossible to believe that The Tribune was dead. It was 
more than the death of an abstract thing, more than the 
collapse of a business enterprise. Something of our¬ 
selves had died with it, our hopes and endeavors, our 
work of brain and heart. A newspaper is a living organ¬ 
ism, threaded through with the nerves of men and women, 
inspired by their spirit, animated by their ideals and 
thought, the living vehicle of their own adventure of 
life. So The Tribune seemed to us then, in that last 

107 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

hour, when we looked back on our labor and comrade¬ 
ship, our laughter, our good times together on “the rag,” 
as we had called it. 

Long after midnight I left the office for the last time, 
with that friend of mine who had gone to Augustine 
Birrell, a tall, melancholy-mannered, Georgian-looking 
man, whose tall hat was a noble specimen of old-fashioned 
type. 

The brilliant lights outside the office suddenly went 
out. It was like the sinking of the ship. My friend said, 
“Dead! Dead!” and lifted his hat as in the presence of 
death. 


\ 

i 


io8 


IX 


A fter the downfall of The Tribune there was a 
period of suffering, anxiety, and in some cases 
despair, for many of the men who had held positions on 
that paper. One good fellow committed suicide. Others 
fell into grievous debt while waiting like Mr. Micawber 
for something to turn up. Fleet Street is a cruel high¬ 
way for out-of-work journalists, and as so many were 
turned out into the street together it was impossible for 
all of them to be absorbed by other newspapers, already 
fully staffed. 

There were rendezvous of disconsolate comrades in 
the Press Club or Anderton’s Hotel, where they greeted 
each other with the gloomy inquiry, “Got anything yet?” 
and then, smoking innumerable cigarettes, in lieu, some¬ 
times, of more substantial nourishment, cursed the cruelty 
of life, the abominable insecurity of journalism, and 
their own particular folly in entering that ridiculous, 
heartbreaking, soul-destroying career. . . . One by one, 
in course of time, they found other jobs down the same 
old street. 

I determined to abandon regular journalism altogether, 
and to become a “literary gent” in the noblest meaning 
of the words, and anyhow a free lance. I have always 
regarded journalism as merely a novitiate for real litera¬ 
ture, a training school for life and character, from which 
I might gain knowledge and inspiration for great novels, 
as Charles Dickens had done. My ambition, at that time, 
was limitless, and I expected genius to break out in me 
at any moment. Oh, Youth I Here, then, was my chance, 
now that I was free from the fetters of the journalistic 
prison house. 

109 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

With a wealth of confidence and hope, but very little 
capital of a more material kind, I took a cottage at the 
seashore for a month and departed there with my wife 
and small boy. It was a coast-guard’s cottage at Little- 
hampton, looking on to the sea and sand, and surrounded 
by a fence one foot high, like the doll’s house it was. 
There, in a tiny room, filled with the murmur of the sea, 
and the vulgar songs of seaside Pierrots, I wrote my 
novel. The Street of Adventure^ in which I told, in the 
guise of fiction, the history of The Tribune newspaper, 
and gave a picture of the squalor, disappointment, adven¬ 
ture, insecurity, futility, and good comradeship of Fleet 
Street. 

It was much to be desired that this novel of mine should 
be a success. Even my wife’s humorous contentment with 
poverty, which has always been a saving grace in my 
life, did not eliminate the need of a certain amount of 
ready money. The Street of Adventure, my most suc¬ 
cessful novel, cost me more than I earned. In the first 
place, it narrowly escaped total oblivion, which would 
have saved me great anxiety and considerable expense. 
After leaving the coast-guard’s cottage at Littlehampton, 
with my manuscript complete—150,000 words in one 
month—I had to change trains at Guildford to get to 
London from some other place. My thoughts were so 
busy with the story I had written, and with the fortune 
that awaited me by its success, that I left the manuscript 
on the mantelpiece in the waiting room of Guildford 
Station, and did not discover my loss until I had been 
in London some hours. It seemed—for five minutes of 
despair—like the loss of my soul. Never should I have 
had the courage to rewrite that novel which had cost 
so much labor and so much nervous emotion. Despair¬ 
ingly I telegraphed to the station master, and my joy 
was great when, two hours later, I received his answer: 
“Papers found.” Little did I then know that if he had 

no 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

used them to brighten his fire I should have been saved 
sleepless nights and unpleasant apprehensions. 

It was accepted and published by William Heinemann, 
on a royalty basis, and it was gloriously reviewed. But 
almost immediately I received a writ of libel from one 
of my friends and colleagues on the late Tribune, and 
sinister rumors reached me that Franklin Thomasson, 
the proprietor, and six other members of the staff were 
consulting their solicitors on the advisability of taking 
action against me. I saw ruin staring me in the face. 
My fanciful narrative had not disguised carefully enough 
the actuality of the Tribune and its staff. My fancy 
portraits and amiable caricatures had been identified, and 
could not be denied. Fortunately only one writ was 
actually presented and proceeded with, against myself 
and Heinemann, but the book was withdrawn from cir¬ 
culation at a time when the reviews were giving it columns 
of publicity, and it was killed stone dead—though later 
it had a merry resurrection. 

The man who took a libel action against me was the 
character who in my book is called Christopher Cod- 
rington, the same young man who had lifted his hat 
when the lights went out and said, “Dead! Dead!” He 
and I had been good friends, and I believed, and still 
believe, that my portrait of him was a very agreeable 
and fanciful study of his amiable peculiarities—his 
Georgian style of dress, his gravity of speech, his Bohem- 
ianism. But he resented that portrait, and was convinced 
that I had grossly maligned him. The solicitors employed 
by myself and Heinemann to prepare the defense piled 
up the usual bill of costs (and I had to pay the publisher’s 
share as well as my own), so that by the time the case 
was ready to come into court I knew that, win or lose, 
I should have some pretty fees to pay. It never came 
into court. A few days before the case was due, I met 
“Christopher Codrington” in Fleet Street! We paused, 

III 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

hesitated, raised our hats solemnly, and then laughed 
(we had always been much amused with each other). 

“What about some lunch together?” I suggested. 

“It would never do,” he answered. “In a few days 
we shall be engaged in a legal duel.” 

“Meanwhile one must eat,” I remarked casually. 

He agreed. 

We had a good luncheon at The Cock in Fleet Street. 
I had the honor of paying for it. We discussed our 
chances in the libel action. Christopher Codrington said 
he had a “clear case.” He emphasized the damnably 
incriminating passages. I argued that he would only 
make himself ridiculous by identifying himself with my 
pleasantries and giving them a sinister twist. We parted 
in a friendly, courteous way, as two gentlemen who would 
cross swords later in the week. 

When my solicitors heard that we two had lunched 
together, they threw up their hands in amazement. 

“The two principals in a libel action I And the one 
who alleges libel allows the other to pay for his lunch! 
The case collapses!” 

They were shocked that the law should be treated with 
such levity. It almost amounted to contempt. 

That evening I called on “Christopher Codrington” 
and explained the grievous lapse of etiquette we had 
both committed. He was disconcerted. He was also 
magnanimous. I obtained his signature to a document 
withdrawing the action, and we shook hands in token 
of mutual affection and esteem. . . . But all my royalties 
on the sales of the novel, afterward reissued in cheap 
form, went to pay Heinemann’s bill and mine, and my 
most successful novel earned for me the sum of £25 until 
it had a second birth in the United States, after the war. 

I knew after that the wear and tear, the mental dis¬ 
tress, the financial uncertainty that befell a free lance in 
search of fame and fortune, when those mocking will-o’- 

112 


\ 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the-wisps lead him through the ditches of disappointment 
and the thickets of ill luck. How many hundreds of times 
did I pace the streets of London in those days, vainly 
seeking the plot of a short story, and haunted by elusive 
characters who would not fit into my combination of cir¬ 
cumstances, ending at four thousand words with a dra¬ 
matic climax! How many hours I have spent glued to a 
seat in Kensington Gardens, working out literary triangles 
with a husband and wife and the third party, two men 
and a woman, two women and a man, and finding only a 
vicious circle of hopeless imbecility! At such times one’s 
nerves get “edgy” and one’s imagination becomes fever¬ 
ish with effort, so that the more desperately one chases 
an idea, the more resolutely it eludes one. It is like the 
disease of sleeplessness. The more one tries to sleep, 
the more wakeful one becomes. Then the free lance, 
having at last captured a good idea, having lived with 
it and shaped it with what sense of truth and beauty is in 
his heart, carries it like a precious gem to the market place. 
Alas, there is no bidder! Or the price offered insults his 
sensitive pride, and mocks at his butcher’s bill. It is “too 
good,” writes a kindly editor. “It is hardly in our style,” 
writes a courteous one. It is “not quite convincing,” 
writes a critical one. ... It is bad to be a free lance in 
this period, when fortune hides. It is worse to be the free 
lance’s wife. His absent-mindedness becomes a disease. 

(I remember posting twenty-two letters with twenty- 
two stamps, but separately, letters first and stamps next, 
in the red mouth of the pillar box!) 

His moods of despair when his pen won’t write a 
single lucky word give an atmosphere of neurasthenia to 
the house. He becomes irritable, uncourteous, unkind, 
because, poor devil, he believes that he has lost his touch 
and his talent, upon which this woman’s life depends, as 
well as his own. 

My life as a free lance was not devoid of those periods 

113 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

of morbid depression, and yet, on the whole, I was 
immensely lucky, compared with many other beggars of 
my craft. It was seldom that I couldn’t find some kind 
of a market for my wares, and I had an industry—I can 
at least boast of that, whatever the quality of my pen— 
which astonishes myself when I look back upon those days. 
I was also gifted to this extent—that I had the journal¬ 
istic instinct of writing “brightly” on almost any subject 
in which I could grab at a few facts, and I could turn 
my pen to many different aspects of life and letters, w’hich 
held for me always fresh and enthusiastic interest. Not 
high qualities, but useful to a young man in the capture 
of the fleeting guinea. 

I worked hard, and I enjoyed my toil. While earning 
bread and butter by special articles and short stories, I 
devoted much time and infinite labor to the most unprofit¬ 
able branch of literature, which is history, and my first 
love. Goodness knows how many books I read in order 
to produce my Men and Women of the French Revolu¬ 
tion, published in magnificent style, with a superb set 
of plates from contemporary prints, and almost profit¬ 
less to me. 

• It was by casual acquaintance with one of the queer 
old characters of London that I obtained the use of those 
plates. He was a dear, dirty old gentleman, who had 
devoted his whole life to print collecting and had one 
of the finest collections in England. He lived in an old 
house near Clerkenwell, which was just a storehouse for 
these engravings, mezzotints, woodcuts, and colored 
prints of the eighteenth century. He kept them in 
bundles, in boxes, in portfolios, wherever there was floor 
space, chair space, and table space. To reach his desk, 
where he sat curled up in a swivel chair, one had to step 
over a barricade of those bundles. At meal times he 
threw crumbs to the mice who were his only companions, 
except an old housekeeper, and whenever the need of 

114 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

money became pressing, as it did in his latter years, he 
used to take out a print, sigh over it as at the parting of 
an old friend, and trot round to one of the London print 
sellers who would “cash it” like a cheque. ... I think 
I made £150 out of Alen and Women of the French 
Revolution, and my best reward was to see it, years 
later, in the windows of the Paris bookshops. That 
gave me a real thrill of pride and pleasure. . . . 

I made less than £150 by my life of George Villiers, 
Duke of Buckingham, one of the most romantic char¬ 
acters in English history, and strangely unknown, except 
for Scott’s portrait in The Fortunes of Nigel, and the 
splendid figure drawn by Alexandre Dumas in The Three 
Musketeers, until, with prodigious labor, which was truly 
a labor of love, I extracted from old papers and old 
letters the real life story of this man, and the very secrets 
of his heart, more romantic, and more fascinating, in 
actual fact, than the fiction regarding him by those two 
great masters. 

I think it was £80 that I was paid for King^s Fav¬ 
orite, in which again I searched the folios of the past 
for light on one of the most astounding mysteries in 
English history—the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury 
by the Earl of Somerset and the Countess of Essex— 
and discovered a plot with kings and princes, great lords 
and ladies, bishops and judges, poisoners, witch doctors, 
cutthroats and poets, as hideously wicked as in one of 
Shakespeare’s tragedies. I was immensely interested in 
this work. I gained gratifying praise from scholars and 
critics. But I kept myself poor for knowledge sake. 
History does not pay—unless it is a world history by 
H. G. Wells. Never mind I I had a good time in writing 
it, and do not begrudge the labor. 

My book on George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, 
brought me the friendship of the very noble and charm¬ 
ing family of the Earl and Countess of Denbigh. Lord 

115 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Denbigh is the descendant of Susan Villiers—the sister 
of George Villiers—who married the first Earl of Den¬ 
bigh, and he has in his possession the original letters 
written by the Duke of Buckingham to his devoted wife, 
and her beautiful letters to him, as well as a mass of 
other correspondence of great historical value. Lord 
Denbigh invited me down to Newnham Paddox, his lovely 
Warwickshire home, founded by his ancestors in the 
reign of James I, and in the long gallery I saw the famous 
VanDyck portraits of the Duke of Buckingham, the 
“hero” of my book, which have now been sold, with other 
priceless treasures, when war and after-war taxation 
have impoverished this old family, like so many others 
in England to-day. I always look back to those visits 
I paid to Newnham Paddox as to a picture of English 
life, before so much of its sunshine was eclipsed by the 
cost and sacrifice of that great tragedy. They were a 
large and happy family in that old house, with three 
sons and a crowd of beautiful girls, as frank and merry 
and healthy in body and soul as Shakespeare’s Beatrice 
and Katherine, Rosamond and Celia. I remember them 
playing tennis below the broad terrace with its climbing 
flowers, and the sound of their laughter that came ring¬ 
ing across the court when Lady Dorothy leapt the net, 
or Lady Marjorie took a flying jump at a high ball. On 
a Sunday afternoon they captured some tremendous cart 
horses, grazing on the day of rest, mounted them without 
reins or bridle, rode them astride, charged each other 
like knights at a tourney, fearless and free, while Lady 
Denbigh laughed joyously at the sight of their romps. 
There was an exciting rat hunt in an old barn, which was 
nearly pulled down to get at the rats. ... No one saw 
a shadow creeping close to those sunlit lawns, to touch 
the lives of this English family and all others. They 
played the good game of life in pre-war England. They 
played the game of life and death with equal courage 

n6 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

when war turned Newnham Paddox into a hospital and 
called upon those boys and girls for service and sacrifice. 
The eldest son, Lord Feilding, was an officer in the 
Guards, and badly wounded. Two of the boys were 
killed, one in the Army, one in the Navy. Lady Dorothy 
led an ambulance convoy in Belgium, and I met her 
there when she was under fire, constantly, in ruined 
towns and along sinister, shell-broken roads, injecting 
morphia into muddy, bloody men, just picked up from the 
fields and ditches, crying aloud in agony. Lady Denbigh 
herself wore out her health and spirit, and died soon 
after the Armistice. It was the record of many families 
like that, who gave all they had for England’s sake. 

During that time of free lancing I enlarged my list of 
acquaintances by friendly encounter with some of the 
great ones of the world, its passing notorieties, and its 
pleasant and unpleasant people. 

In the first class was that curious old gentleman, the 
Duke of Argyll, husband of Princess Louise. As poor 
as a church mouse, he was given house-room in Kensington 
Palace, where I used to take tea with him now and then, 
and discuss literature, politics, and history, of which he 
had a roving knowledge. I was a neighbor of his, living 
at that time in what I verily believe was the smallest 
house in London, at Holland Street, Kensington, and it 
used to amuse me to step out of my doll’s house, with or 
without eighteenpence in my pocket, and walk five hun¬ 
dred yards to the white portico on the west side of the 
old red brick palace, to take tea with a Royal duke. The 
poor old gentleman was so bored with himself that I 
think he would have invited a tramp to tea, for the sake 
of a little conversation, but for the austere supervision 
of Princess Louise, of whom he stood in awe. As the 
Marquis of Lome, and one of the handsomest young 
men in England, he had gained something of a reputation 
as a poet and essayist. His poetry in later years was 

117 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

ponderously bad, but he wrote idealistic essays which 
had some touch of style and revealed a mind above the 
average in nobility of purpose. 

As an editor I had bought some of his literary pro¬ 
ductions, and had put a number of useful guineas into the 
old man’s pockets, so that he had a high esteem for me, 
as a man with immense power in the press, though, as 
a free lance, I had none. 

This acquaintanceship startled some of my brother 
journalists on the day of King Edward’s funeral at Wind¬ 
sor Castle. The Duke of Argyll was a grand figure that 
day, in a magnificent uniform, with the Order of the 
Garter, decorations thick upon his breast, and a great 
plumed hat. After the ceremony, standing among a 
crowd of princes, he hailed me, and walked arm in arm 
with me along the ramparts. I felt somewhat embar¬ 
rassed at this distinction, especially as I was in the full 
gaze of my comrades of Fleet Street, who stood at a 
little distance. They saw the humor of the situation 
when I gave them a friendly wink, but afterward accused 
me of unholy “swank.” 

It was about this time that I came to know Beerbohm 
Tree, in many ways the greatest, and in more ways the 
worst, of our English actors. He was playing Caliban 
in “The Tempest” when I sought an interview with him 
on the subject of Shakespeare. 

“Shakespeare! . . . Shakespeare I” he said, leering at 
me with a beastlike face, according to the part he was 
playing, and clawing himself with apelike hands. “I seem 
to have heard that name. Is there anything I can say 
about him? No, there is nothing. I’ve said all I know 
a thousand times, and more than I know more times 
than that.” 

He could think of nothing to say about Shakespeare, 
but suggested that I should run away and write what I 
liked. I did, and it was at least a year before the article 

n8 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

was published in a series of provincial papers, a long 
article in which I wrote all that I thought Tree ought to 
say, if he loved Shakespeare with anything like my own 
passion. 

One evening I received a long telegram from him. 

“Honor me by accepting two stalls any night at His 
Majesty’s and kindly call on me between the acts.” 

I accepted the invitation, wondering at its effusiveness. 
When I called on him, he was playing Brutus, and clasped 
my hand as though he loved me. 

“Little do you know the service you have done me,” 
he said. “My secretary told me the other night that I 
was booked for a lecture on Shakespeare at the Regent 
Street Polytechnic. I had forgotten it. I had nothing 
prepared. It was a dreadful nuisance. I said ‘I won’t 
go.’ He said, ‘I’m afraid you must.’ . . . Two minutes 
later a bundle of press cuttings was brought to me. It 
contained your interview with me on the subject of 
Shakespeare. I read it with delight. I had no idea I 
had said all those things. What a memory you must 
have! I took the paper to the Polytechnic, and delivered 
my lecture, by reading it word for word.” 

After that I met Tree many times and he never forgot 
that little service. In return he invited me to the Gar¬ 
rick Club, or to his great room at the top of His Maj¬ 
esty’s, and told me innumerable anecdotes which were 
vastly entertaining. He had a rich store of them, and 
told them with a ripe humor and dramatic genius which 
revealed him at his best. His acting was marred by 
affectations that became exasperating, and sometimes by 
loss of memory and sheer carelessness. I have seen him 
actually asleep on the stage. It was when he played the 
part of Fagin in “Oliver Twist,” and in a scene where he 
had to sit crouched below a bridge, waiting for Bill Sikes, 
he dozed off, wakened with a start, and missed his cue. 

Tree’s egotism was almost a disease, and in his last 

119 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

years his vanity and pretentiousness obscured his real 
genius. He was a great old showman, and at rehearsals 
it was remarkable how he could pull a crowd together 
and build up a big picture or intensify a dramatic moment 
by some touch of “business.” But he played to the gal¬ 
lery all the time, and made a pantomime of Shakespeare 
—to the horror of the Germans when he appeared in 
Berlin! They would not tolerate him, and were scan¬ 
dalized that such liberties should be taken with Shake¬ 
spearian drama, which they have adopted as their own. 

Another great figure of the stage whom I met behind 
the scenes was Sarah Bernhardt, when she appeared at 
the Coliseum in London. She took the part of Adrienne 
Lecouvreur, in which she was an unconscionable time 
a-dying, after storms of agony and mad passion. I had 
an appointment to meet her in her room after the play, 
and slipped round behind the scenes before she left the 
stage. Her exit was astonishing and touching. The 
whole company of the Coliseum and its variety show— 
acrobats, jugglers, “funny” men, dancing girls, “star 
turns”—had lined up in a double row to await this Queen 
of Tragedy, with homage. As she came off the stage, 
George Robey, with his red nose and ridiculous little 
hat, gravely offered his arm, with the air of Walter 
Raleigh in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. She leaned 
heavily on his arm, and almost collapsed in the chair to 
which he led her. She was panting after her prolonged 
display of agony before the footlights, and for a moment 
I thought she was really dying. 

I bent over her and said in French that I regretted she 
was so much fatigued. My words angered Tier instantly, 
as though they reflected upon her age. 

“Sir,” she said harshly, “I was as much fatigued when 
I first played that scene—was it thirty years ago, or 
forty?—I have forgotten. It is the exhaustion of art, 
and not of nature.” 

120 


I 


X 


a special correspondent of The Daily Chronicle 



n. (after a spell of free-lance work) I went abroad a , 
good deal on various missions, and occasionally took 


charge of the Paris office in the absence of Martin Dono¬ 


hue who held that post but was frequently away on some 
adventure in other countries. 

I came to know and to love Paris, by day and night. 


on both sides of the Seine, and in all its quarters, rich 


and poor. To me it is still the most attractive city in 
the world, and I have an abiding passion for its ghosts, 
its beauty, and its people. To “feel” Paris one must be 


steeped in the history and literature of France, so that. 


one walks, not lonely, but as a haunted man along the 
rue St. Honore, where Danton lived, and where Robes¬ 


pierre closed his shutters when Marie Antoinette passed 


on her tumbril; in the Palais Royal, where Camille Des¬ 
moulins plucked leaves from the trees and stuck them 
in his hat as a green cockade; in the great nave of Notre 
Dame, where a thousand years of faith, passion, tragedy, 
glory, touch one’s spirit, closely, as one’s hand touches 
its old stones; across the Pont Neuf, where Henry met 
his murderer, and where all Paris passed, with its heroes, 
cutthroats, and fair women; on the left bank, by the book¬ 
stalls, where poets and scholars roved, with hungry stom¬ 
achs and eager minds; up in the Quartier Latin, where 
centuries of student life have paced by the old gray walls, 
and where wild youth has lived its short dream of love, 
quaffed its heady wine, laughed at life and death; up the 
mountain of Montmartre where apaches used to lurk in 
the darkness, and Vice wore the false livery of Joy; in 

I2I 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the Luxembourg Gardens, where a world of lovers have 
walked, hand in hand, while children played, and birds 
twittered, and green buds grew to leaf, which faded 
and fell as love grew old and died. 

Paris is nothing but an exhibition of architecture and 
a good shopping place, unless one has walked arm in arm 
with D’Artagnan, seen the great Cardinal pass in his 
robes, stood behind the arras when Marguerite de Valois 
supped with her lover, wandered the cold streets o’ nights 
with Frangois Villon, listened to the songs of Ronsard, 
passed across the centuries to the salons of Madame de 
Deffand and Madame Geoffrin, supped with the Encyclo¬ 
paedists, and heard the hoarse laughter of the mobs when 
the head of the Princesse de Lamballe was paraded on a 
pike, and the fairest heads of France fell under the knife 
into the basket of the guillotine. It was Dumas, Victor 
Hugo, Erckmann-Chatrian, Eugene Sue, Murger, Guy de 
Maupassant, Michelet’s “France,” and odd bits of reading 
in French history, fiction, and poetry, which gave me the 
atmosphere of Paris, and revealed in its modernity, even 
in its most squalid aspects, a background of romance. 

So it has been with millions of others to whom Paris 
is an enchanted city. But, as a journalist, I had the chance 
to get behind the scenes of life in Paris, and to put 
romance to the test of reality. 

One of my earliest recollections of Paris was when I 
went there for a fortnight with my wife, in the first year 
of our marriage, on savings from my majestic income of 
£120 a year. We stayed in a little hotel called the Hotel 
du Dauphin, in the rue St. Roch—where Napoleon fired 
his “whiff of grapeshot”—and explored the city and all 
its museums with untiring delight, although at that time, 
during the Dreyfus trial and the Fashoda crisis, England 
was so unpopular that we—obviously English—were 
actually insulted in the streets. (It was before the 
Entente Cordiale!) 


122 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

One little show was unusual in its character. A fool 
named Jules Guerin, wanted by the police for not paying 
his rates, or something of the kind, fortified his house 
in the rue Chabrol, and defied the whole armed might of 
Paris to fetch him out. It was a kind of Sidney Street 
affair, for he was armed with an automatic pistol and 
fired at any policeman who approached. M. Lepine, the 
prefect, decided to besiege him and starve him out, and 
when my wife and I wedged our way through vast crowds, 
we found the rue Chabrol surrounded by a veritable army 
of gendarmes. No one was allowed down the street, to 
the great annoyance of my wife, who desired to see Jules 
Guerin. 

While we were talking together, a woman plucked my 
wife’s sleeve and said in French, “You want to see 
Guerin? . . . Come with me.” 

She led us down a number of narrow passages beyond 
the police cordon until, suddenly, we came into the very 
center of the deserted street. 

“Voila!” said the woman. “Vous voyez I’imbecile!” 

She pointed to an upper window, and there, sure 
enough, was the “imbecile,” Guerin, a sinister-looking 
fellow with a black beard, with a large revolver very 
much in evidence. My wife laughed at him, and he 
looked very much annoyed. ... It was a full week be¬ 
fore he surrendered to the law. 

One of the most interesting times I had in Paris was 
when the Confederation Generale de Travail, under the 
leadership of Jean Jaures, declared a general strike 
against the government of Aristide Briand. It was a 
trial of strength between those two men, who had once 
been comrades in the extreme Left of revolutionary labor. 
Both of them were men of outstanding character. Jaures 
was much more than a hot-headed demagogue, of the new 
Bolshevik type, eager to destroy civilization in revenge 
against “Capital.” He was a lover of France in every 

123 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

fiber of his body and brain, and a man of many Christian 
qualities, including kindness and charity and personal 
morality, in spite of religious scepticism. He saw with 
clear vision the approaching danger of war with Ger¬ 
many, and he devoted his life, and lost it, on behalf of 
antimilitarism, believing that German democracy could 
be won over to international peace, if French democracy 
would link up with them. It was for that reason that he 
attacked the three years’ system of military service, and 
denounced the increasing expenditure of France on mili¬ 
tary preparations. But to attain his ideal of international 
peace, he played into the hands of revolutionary labor, 
and defended many of its violent methods, including 
“direct action.” It was with Aristide Briand that he had 
drawn up the plans of a general strike in which every 
trade union or syndicate in France would join at the 
appointed hour, in order to demonstrate the power of 
“Labor” and to overthrow the autocracy of “Capital.” 

When Briand deserted the Left Wing, modified his 
views for the sake of office, and finally became Premier of 
France, Jaures, who had taunted him as a renegade, put 
into operation against him the weapon he had helped to 
forge. A general strike was declared. 

There were astonishing scenes in Paris. The ma¬ 
chinery of social life came to a dead stop. No railway 
trains arrived or departed, and I had a sensational jour¬ 
ney from Calais to Paris in the last train through, driven 
by an amateur who had not mastered the mystery of the 
brakes, so that the few passengers, with the last supply 
of milk for Paris, were bumped and jolted with terrifying 
shocks. 

Food from the rural districts was held up on wayside 
stations, and Paris was like a besieged city, living on 
rapidly diminishing stocks. The “Metro” ceased work, 
and armies of clerks, shopgirls, and business men had to 
walk to their work from suburbs or distant quarters. 

124 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

They made a joke of it, and laughed and sang on their 
way, as though it was the greatest jest in the world. But 
it became beyond a jest after the first day or two, espe¬ 
cially at night, when Paris was plunged into abysmal 
darkness because the electricians had joined the railway 
men and all other branches of labor. 

The restaurants and cafes along the great boulevards 
were dimly lighted by candles stuck into wine and beer 
bottles, and bands of students from the Latin Quarter 
paraded with paper lanterns, singing the Funeral March 
and other doleful ditties, not without a sense of romance 
and adventure in that city of darkness. The apaches, 
who love not the light, came out of their lairs, beyond 
Clichy, and fell upon wanderers in the gloom, robbing 
them of their watches and ready money, and clubbing 
them if they put up any resistance. No milk could be 
had for love or money, no butter, eggs, fish, or fresh meat, 
except by the rich hotels which cornered the markets 
with their small supplies brought in by farm carts, hand 
carts, or babies’ perambulators. 

On the whole there was very little violence, for, in 
spite of their excitability, Parisian crowds are good- 
natured and law-abiding. But there was one section which 
gave trouble. It was the union of terrassiers or day 
laborers. They knocked off work and strolled down 
toward the center of Paris in strong bodies, looking 
dangerous and picturesque in their great loose breeches 
tucked into their boots, short jackets, and flat bonnets 
pulled over the right eye. Most of them carried knives 
or cheap pistols, and they had ancient, traditional grudges 
against the agents de police. 

Those simple and admirable men were remarkably 
polite to them, and generally contrived to keep at a safe 
distance when they appeared in force. But the mounted 
police of the Garde Republicaine tried to herd them back 
from the shopping centers of the city which they threat- 

125 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

ened to loot, and came into immediate conflict with them. 
As an observer interested in the drama of life, I several 
times became unpleasantly mixed up with terrassiers and 
other rash onlookers when the Garde Republicaine rode 
among them, and I had some narrow escapes from being 
trampled down. 

A hot affair took place round a scaffolding which had 
been put up for some new building up by Montmartre. 
The terrassiers, driven back by the mounted men who 
used the flat of their swords, made a stronghold of this 
place, and loosed off their pistols or flung brickbats at the 
“enemy,” inflicting several casualties. Orders were given 
to clear out this hornets’ nest, and the Garde Republicaine 
charged right up to the scaffolding and hauled out the 
ruffians, who were escorted as prisoners through hooting 
mobs. It was all very exciting, and Paris was beginning 
to lose its temper. 

Jaures had called a great meeting of cheminots —the 
railway workers—in the Salle de Manege, or riding 
school, down the rue St. Denis. In the interests of The 
Daily Chronicle I decided to attend it. It was in a low 
quarter of the city, and vast crowds of factory workers 
and young hooligans surged up and down the street, 
jeering at the police, and asking for trouble. Far away, 
above their heads, I could see the steel helmets with their 
long black plumes of the Garde Republicaine. 

A narrow passage led to the Salle de Manege, where 
Jaures had begun his meeting with an assembly of two 
thousand railway workers, packed tight, as I could see 
when the door was opened an inch to give them air. It 
was guarded by a group of strikers who told me in rough 
language to clear off, when I asked for admission. One 
of them, however, caught my remark that I belonged to 
The Daily Chronicle. It impressed him favorably. “I 
used to read it when I was a hairdresser in Soho,” he told 
me. He opened the door enough for me to step inside. 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Presently I was sorry he did. The atmosphere was 
hellish in its heat and stench, arising from the wet saw¬ 
dust of the riding school and the greasy clothes of this 
great crowd of men, densely massed. Jaures was on the 
tribune, speaking with a powerful, sonorous voice^ I 
forget his words, but remember his appeal to the men to 
reveal the nobility of labor by their loyalty and their 
discipline. He was scornful of the renegade Briand who 
had sold his soul for office and was ready to use bayonets 
against the liberties of men whose cause he had once 
defended with passionate hypocrisy. . . . After an hour 
of this, I thought I should die of suffocation, and man¬ 
aged to escape. 

It was out of the frying pan into the fire, for the 
crowds in the rue St. Denis were being forced back by 
the Republican Guard, and I was carried off my feet in 
the stampede, until I became wedged against the wall 
of a corner cafe, with a surging crowd in front. Some one 
flung a wine bottle at one of the Republican Guards, and 
unseated him. Immediately the mounted troops rode 
their horses at the throng outside the cafe. Tables fell 
over, chairs were smashed, and a score of men and women 
fell in a heap through the plate glass windows. There 
were shrieks of terror, mingled with yells of mirth. I 
decided to watch the drama, if possible, from a more 
comfortable observation post, and knocked at the door 
of one of the tall tenement houses near by. It was opened 
by a villainous-looking man, shielding the flame of a 
candle with a filthy hand. 

“What do you want?” he asked in French. 

“A view from your top window,” I said. 

He bargained with me sullenly, and I agreed to five 
francs for a place on his roof. It was worth that money, 
to me, to see how the poor of Paris sleep in their cheap 
lodging houses. I went through the rooms on each floor, 
by way of rickety old stairs, and in each room were 

127 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

fifteen to twenty people, sitting or lying on iron bed¬ 
steads, men in some rooms, women in others. Some of 
them were sleeping and snoring, others lay half-dressed, 
reading scraps of newspaper by flickering gas light. 
Others were undressing, careless of the publicity given 
to their rags. It was astonishing to me that hardly any 
of them paid the slightest attention to the scenes in the 
street below, which were becoming riotous, as I could 
hear by gusts of noise, in which the shrieks of women 
mingled with hoarse groans and yells and a kind of sullen 
chant with the words, ^^Hue! Hue! Hue! A has la 
police. A has la police! Hue! Hue! Hue!” 

This house was older than the French Revolution, and 
I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps when the tumbrils 
were passing on their way to the guillotine, men and 
women like this were lying abed, or yawning and comb¬ 
ing their matted hair, or playing cards by candlelight, as 
two fellows here, not bothering to glance beyond the 
windows at such a common sight as another batch of 
aristocrats going to their death. 

From the roof I looked down on the turbulent crowd, 
charged again and again by the Republican Guards until 
the street was clear. Presently the cheminots came surg¬ 
ing out of the Salle de Manege, with Jaures at their head, 
walking very slowly. The police let Jaures get past, and 
then broke up the procession behind him, with needless 
brutality, as it seemed to me. Many men were knocked 
down, and fell under the horses’ hoofs. Others were 
beaten by blunt swords. 

Not only Paris was in the throes of the general strike, 
but all France. It was a serious threat to the French 
government and to the social life of the people. Briand, 
who had played with revolutionary ideas as a younger 
man, showed now that he had the wisdom that comes 
from responsibility, and the courage to apply it. He 
called certain classes to the colors. If they disobeyed, 

128 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

it would be treason to the Flag, punishable by death. If 
they obeyed, it would break the general strike, as they 
would be ordered, as soldiers, to run the trains, and dis¬ 
tribute supplies. It was a great risk to take, threatening 
civil war, but he took it, believing that few men would 
refuse obedience to military discipline. He was right, 
and by this means he crushed the general strike and broke 
the power of the trade unions. 

I interviewed him at that time, and remember my first 
meeting with that man who afterward, when the World 
War had ended In the defeat of Germany, held the office 
of Premier again and endeavored vainly to save France 
from the ruin which followed victory. 

I waited for him, by appointment. In a great salon 
furnished In the style of Louis XV, with gilded chairs 
and a marble-topped table at which Napoleon had once 
sat as Emperor. I was chatting with one of his secre¬ 
taries, when the door opened, and a tall, heavily built 
man with large, dark, melancholy eyes, came Into the 
room. He looked at me somberly, and I stared back, 
not realizing that It was the Prime Minister of France. 
Then the secretary whispered “Monsieur Briand,” and 
he held out his hand to me. We had a long talk, or, 
rather, he talked and I listened. Impressed by the ap¬ 
parent frankness and simplicity and courage of the man. 

He told me how great had been the danger to France 
from the forces of anarchy let loose by the Confederation 
Gerierale de Travail by their action of the general strike, 
and he defended the policy by which he had broken that 
threat against the authority of government. He did not 
disguise from me that he had risked not only his political 
life and reputation, but even the very peace and stability 
of France. But that risk had been necessary, because the 
alternative would have been a weak and shameful sur¬ 
render to anarchy and revolution. 

Jaures was beaten, as he deserved to be, on that Issue. 

129 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

His worst defeat was not then, but in August of 1914, 
when those German Socialists, in whose pacifism and 
brotherhood of man he had believed, supported the chal¬ 
lenge of their war lords against France and Russia, and 
marched with all the rest toward the French frontier. 
The whole of Jaures’s life struggle for international peace 
was made vain by the beating of drums for the greatest 
war in history. Among his own people there were many, 
once spellbound by his oratory and loyal to his leader¬ 
ship, who now abused him as the man who had weakened 
the defenses of France by his antimilitarist influence. 
There were some, even, who said “Jaures betrayed us 
to the Enemy 1 ” 

On that night when many nations of Europe answered 
the call to arms, stupefied, conscious of enormous terrors 
approaching all human life, hearing already, in imagina¬ 
tion, the thunder of a world of guns that had not yet 
opened fire, I paced the streets of Paris with a friend, 
wondering how soon he and I would be caught up in that 
death struggle. 

“Let us turn in at the Croissanty^ he said. “We must 
eat, though the world goes mad.” 

It was late, and when we arrived at the restaurant 
in the rue Montmartre, it was closed and guarded by 
police. 

“What has happened?” I asked, and some one in the 
crowd answered with intense emotion: 

“Jaures is assassinated! He was shot there, as he sat 
at dinner.” 

He was shot from behind a curtain, in a plush-covered 
seat where often I had sat, by some young man who 
believed that, in killing Jaures, he was helping to secure 
the victory of France. 

I saw his funeral cortege. They gave him a great 
funeral. Ministers of France, men of all parties, digni¬ 
taries of the Church, marched behind his coffin, and be- 

130 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

hind the red flags which were blown by a strong wind. 
It was not love for him, but fear of the people which 
caused that demonstration at his burial. It was an appeal 
for that Union Sacree of all classes by which alone the 
menace to the life of France might be resisted. There 
need have been no fear. There was hardly a man in 
France who did not offer his life as a willing sacrifice, 
in that war which seemed not only against France and 
her friends, but against civilization itself and all humanity. 
So the poilus believed, with simple faith, unshaken by any 
doubt—in the peaceful policy of France and the unpro¬ 
voked aggression of Germany. 

The restaurant in which Jaures was killed—the Crois¬ 
sant, with the sign of the Turkish Crescent—was one of 
the few in Paris open all night for the use of journalists 
who slept by day. Needless to say, other night birds, 
even more disreputable, found this place a pleasant sanc¬ 
tuary in the wee sma’ hours. I went there often for 
some meal which might have been dinner, lunch, or break¬ 
fast, any time between 2 and 5 A.M. I was with my 
colleague, Henri Bourdin, during the Italian war in 
Tripoli. 

Our job was to receive long dispatches over the tele¬ 
phone, from Italian correspondents, and transmit them 
by telephone to London. It was a maddening task, be¬ 
cause after very few minutes of conversation, the tele¬ 
phone cut us off from one of the Italian cities, or from 
London, and only by curses and prayers and passionate 
pleading to lady operators could we establish contact 
again. 

Though the war in Tripoli was a trivial episode, wiped 
out in our memory by another kind of war, the Italian 
correspondents wrote millions of words about every affair 
of outposts—all of which streamed over the telephone in 
florid Italian. I had a Sicilian who translated that Italian 
into frightful French, which I, in turn, translated into 

131 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

somewhat less frightful English, and conveyed by tele¬ 
phone to London. 

It went on hour after hour, day after day, and night 
after night, especially from a man named Bevione. I 
hated his eloquence so much that I made a solemn vow 
to kill him, if ever I met him in the flesh. ... I met 
him in Bulgaria, during another war, but he was so 
charming that I forgave him straightway for all the 
agony he had inflicted on me. Besides, undoubtedly, he 
would have killed me first. 

The Sicilian was a marvel. Between the telephone 
calls he narrated all his love affairs since the age of 
fourteen, and they were innumerable. During the tele¬ 
phone calls, it was he who pleaded with the lady operators 
not to cut him off, or to get his call again. He punctuated 
every sentence with a kiss. “Madonna! . . . Bacio! 
. . . Bacio!” He gave these unknown beauties (perhaps 
they were as ugly as sin!) a million kisses over the tele¬ 
phone wires, and by this frenzy of amorous demonstra¬ 
tion seriously disturbed the Paris exchange, and held up 
all our rivals. 

Henri Bourdin, in intervals of waiting, used to make 
the time pass by acting all the most famous dramas of 
the modern French stage, and I vow that this single man 
used to give me the illusion of having seen the entire 
company of the Comedie Frangaise, so vivid were his 
character studies and descriptions. 

Abandoning the Sicilian to any opportunities of love 
he might find beyond the telephone receiver, Bourdin and 
I used to leave the office on the Boulevard des Capucines 
just as the light of dawn was creeping into the streets of 
Paris, when the chiffonniers picked at the rags in the dust¬ 
bins, and pale ladies of the night passed like ghosts to 
their lodgings in mean streets. 

We made our way sometimes to the markets —Les 
Halles —where the women of the Revolution used to 

132 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

gather with their knitting and their gossip of the latest 
heads to fall in the basket of the guillotine. Many of 
the houses round about belong to that period, and Bourdin 
and I used to take coffee in old eating and drinking houses 
like the ^^Chien qui Fume*^ (The Dog Who Smokes), 
which still have on their walls the iron brackets for the 
lanterns on which French aristocrats were hanged by 
infuriated mobs, in 1793. 

They were still frequented by strange and sinister- 
looking characters. I remember one group, certainly as 
queer as any I have seen. Bourdin and I were seated at 
table when they came in excitedly—about thirty men and 
women, all laughing and jabbering. The men wore long 
hair, very wild and unkempt, with flowing black ties of 
“La Valliere” style. The women had short hair, cut 
with straight fringes. Presently another man appeared, 
astoundingly like Ary Scheffer’s study of Our Lord, with 
long pale hair, and straw-colored beard, and watery blue 
eyes. At his coming, the company became delirious with 
enthusiasm, while he went gravely round the circle and 
kissed each man and woman on the lips. 

It was Bourdin who explained to me the mystery of 
these fantastic creatures. They belonged to the most 
advanced Anarchist society in Paris. The man who ap¬ 
peared last had just been acquitted by the French courts 
on a charge of kidnapping and locking up one of his 
fellow anarchists, who had betrayed the society to the 
police. 

The only time in which I myself have been in the hands 
of the French police was in the early days of the war, 
while I was waiting in Paris for my papers as accredited 
war correspondent with the British Armies in the field. 
This unpleasant experience was due to my ceasless curi¬ 
osity in life and the rash acceptance of a casual invitation. 

A friend of mine had become acquainted with two 
ladies who sang at “Olympia,” and I happened to be in a 

133 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

taxicab with him when they approached the door of his 
vehicle as we alighted. 

It was eleven o’clock at night, and it was murmured 
by the two ladies that they were going to a “reception” 
at some apartment near the Etoile—a most aristocratic 
neighborhood. They would be delighted if we accom¬ 
panied them. I was tired, and did not wish to go, but my 
friend Brown, always fresh at midnight, saw amusement 
ahead, and begged me to come. 

“For an hour, then,” I said. 

In the cab on the way to the Etoile, Brown sang mock 
Italian opera with one of the ladies, who had an excellent 
voice and a sense of humor. I exchanged a few remarks 
with the other lady, and was slightly disturbed by the 
somewhat German accent with which she spoke French. 

Certainly, the apartment in which presently we found 
ourselves, in an avenue by the Etoile, was extremely ele¬ 
gant, and crowded with men and women in evening dress, 
who looked highly respectable. Among them were a few 
French officers in uniform and one English officer. The 
hostess was a charming-looking lady, with snow-white 
hair. There was a little music, a little dancing, and polite 
conversation. It was decorous and dull. 

At the end of an hour I spoke to Brown. 

‘‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.” 

He informed me in a whisper that if I went I should 
be losing something very good in the way of an adventure. 

“This is, undoubtedly, one of the most criminal haunts 
in Paris,” he said. “I can smell abomination! Some¬ 
thing melodramatic will happen before long, or I’ll eat 
my hat.” 

I was surprised, and alarmed. I had no desire to be 
at home in a criminal haunt in time of war. I decided 
even more firmly to go, and went to take leave of the 
charming lady with the snow-white hair. 

She seemed vexed that I should desire to go so soon, 

.134 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

but seeing that I was decided, made a somewhat curious 
request. 

“Do you mind going out by the garden entrance— 
through the French windows? We do not care to show 
lights through the front door. C'est la guerre!'^ 

I went out through the garden entrance, followed by 
Brown, who said I was missing the fun. 

It was dark in the garden, and I stumbled on the way 
to a little garden gate, twenty yards away from the house. 

As I put my hand on the latch of the gate, I was aware 
of a large number of black shadows coming toward me 
out of the bushes beyond. Instinctively I beat a hasty 
retreat back to the house. Something had happened to 
it. Where the French windows had been was now a steel 
door. Brown was doing something mysterious, bending 
low and making pencil marks on a white slab of the wall. 

“What’s up?” I asked. 

“I’m identifying the house, in case of future need,” he 
answered. 

I made a tattoo with my stick against the steel door. 
My one foolish desire was to get back into the house, 
away from those black figures outside the garden gate. 
It was too late. Directly I knocked on the door, a score 
of them rushed into the garden, and I was seized and car¬ 
ried in strong arms until, at a considerable distance, I 
was dumped down under the Eiffel Tower, in charge of 
a dozen agents de police. Groups of men and women in 
evening dress, some of whom I recognized as visitors at 
the reception of the charming lady with the snow-white 
hair, were also in charge of strong bodies of police. My 
friend Brown was a prisoner some twenty yards away. 
It was a cold night, but, philosophically, to the amaze¬ 
ment of the French police, he lay down on the grass and 
went to sleep. 

We were kept under the Eiffel Tower for two hours, 
at the end of which time a motor car drew up, with a 

135 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

gentleman wearing the tricolor sash of a French prefect. 
It was for him that we had been waiting. Strangely 
enough, we were all taken back to the apartment from 
which we had come, and there each person was subjected 
to an examination by the prefect and his assistants. There 
was evident terror among the men and women who had 
passed the evening in the house of mystery. 

Brown and I were liberated after an inspection of our 
passports. On the way home I asked Brown for a little 
explanation, for I could understand nothing of the 
business. 

He understood perfectly. 

“That place was a gambling den. The police were 
looking for German spies, as well as French officers 
absent without leave. I told you we should see some¬ 
thing worth while I” 

I confess I did not think it worth while. I had had 
a nasty fright, caught a bad cold, and missed a good 
night’s sleep. 

But it was certainly a little bit of melodrama, which 
one may find in Paris more easily than in any city in the 
world. 


XI 


A fter the revolution in Portugal, which led to the 
exile of King Manuel and the overthrow of the 
Royalist regime In favor of a republic under the presi¬ 
dency of Affonso Costa, I was asked by Lord Lytton to 
go out and report upon the condition of the prisons in 
that country. 

They were packed with Royalists and with all people, 
of whatever political opinion, who disapproved of the 
principles and methods of the new government. Including 
large numbers of the poorest classes. Sinister stories had 
leaked through about the frightful conditions of these 
political prisoners, and public opinion in England was 
stirred when the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, who had 
. visited Portugal, published some sensational statements. 
I suspected that the dear old Duchess of Bedford was 
influenced a good deal by sentiment for the Royalist cause, 
although when I saw her she was emphatic In saying that 
she had never met King Manuel and was moved to take 
action for purely humanitarian reasons. Lord Lytton, 
a man of liberal and Idealistic mind, was certainly not 
actuated by the desire for Royalist or anti-republican 
propaganda, and in asking me to make an investigation on 
behalf of a committee, he made it clear that he wished 
to have the true facts, uncolored by prejudice. On that 
condition I agreed to go. 

I found, before going, that the moving spirit behind 
the accusations of cruelty appearing in the British 
press against the new rulers of Portugal, and behind 
the Duchess of Bedford, was a little lady named Miss 
Tenison. 


137 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

“She has all the facts in her hands,” said Lord Lytton, 
“and you ought to have a talk with her. You will have 
to make a long journey.” 

I made the journey to a remote part of England, where 
I found a very ancient little house, unchanged by any 
passing of time through many centuries. I was shown 
into a low, long room, haunted, I am certain, by the 
ghosts of Tudor and Stuart England. Two elderly 
ladies, who introduced themselves as Miss Tenison’s 
aunts, sat on each side of a mediaeval fireplace. Presently 
Miss Tenison appeared and for more than a moment— 
for all the time of my visit—I imagined myself in the 
presence of one of those ghosts which should properly 
inhabit a house like this—a young lady in an old-fashioned 
dress, so delicate, so transparent, so spiritual, that I had 
the greatest difficulty in accepting her as an inhabitant 
of this coarse and material world. 

' She was entirely absorbed in the Portuguese affairs, and 
her aunts told me that she dreamed at night about the 
agony of the Royalist prisoners in their dungeons. She 
was in correspondence with many Royalist refugees, and 
with those still hiding in Portugal, from whom she ob¬ 
tained the latest news. She had a romantic admiration— 
though not knowing him personally—for a certain 
count, who had led a counter-revolution and had been 
captured sword in hand, before being flung into prison 
and treated as a common convict. She hated Affonso 
Costa, the President, as Russian emigres afterward 
hated Lenin. 

It was from this little lady, ethereal in appearance 
but as passionate in purpose as Lytton Strachey’s Florence 
Nightingale, that I gained my first insight into the Portu¬ 
guese situation and my letters of introduction to some 
great people still hiding in Lisbon. I left her house with 
the sense of having begun a romantic adventure, with this 
remarkable little lady in the first chapter. 

138 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

The second chapter of my adventure was fantastic, 
for I found myself in the wilds of Spain, suddenly respon¬ 
sible for a German wife and six bandboxes filled with the 
lingerie of six Brazilian beauties. ... It sounds incred¬ 
ible, but it Is true. 

It happened that a tunnel fell down on the engine of 
a train immediately ahead of the one in which I was 
traveling through northern Spain on the way to Lisbon. 
This brought our train to a standstill In a rather desolate 
spot. There was vast excitement, and a babble of tongues. 
Most of the travelers were on their way to Lisbon, to 
catch a boat to Brazil which was leaving the following 
day. Among them was a stout little German, with a large, 
plump, and sad-looking wife. Neither of them could 
speak anything but German, but the husband, who was 
almost apoplectic with rage and anxiety, seemed to divine 
by Intuition that a local train which halted at the wayside 
station might go somewhere In the direction of Lisbon. 
Entirely forgetting his wife, or thinking, perhaps that 
she would follow him whithersoever he went, he sprang 
on to the footboard of the local train, and scrambled in 
just as it steamed away. So there I was with the German 
wife, to whom I had previously addressed a few words, 
and who now appealed to me for advice, protection, and 
something to eat. The poor lady was hungry, and her 
husband had the money. Highly embarrassed, because 
I knew not how long I should be In the company of this 
German Hausfrau, I provided her with some food at the 
buffet, and endeavored to get some news of the best 
manner to reach Lisbon. 

Then the .second blow befell me. Six extraordinarily 
beautiful Brazilian girls, with large black eyes and flash¬ 
ing teeth, did exactly the same thing as the German 
gentleman. That is to say, they hurled themselves Into 
a local train just as It was starting away. Six heads 
screamed out of the carriage window. They were screan> 

139 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

ing at me. It was a wild appeal that I should rescue 
the six enormous bandboxes which they had left on the 
platform, and bring them to a certain hotel in Lisbon. 
So there I was, with the bandboxes and the German 
wife. 

I duly arrived in Lisbon, after a nightmare journey, 
with all my responsibilities, and handed over the band- 
boxes to the Brazilian beauties, and the German wife to 
the German husband. I obtained no gratitude whatever 
in either case. 

In Lisbon I plunged straightway into a life of romance 
and tragedy, which was strangely reminiscent of all I had 
read about the French Revolution. 

With my letters of introduction I called at several 
great houses of the old nobility, which seemed to be 
utterly abandoned. At least, no lights showed through 
the shutters, and they were all bolted and barred within 
their courtyards. At one house, in answer to my knock¬ 
ing, and the ringing of a bell which jangled loudly, there 
came at last an answer. A little door in the wall was 
cautiously opened on a chain by an old man servant with 
a lantern. Upon mentioning my name, and the word 
“Inglese,” which I hoped was good Portuguese for “Eng¬ 
lish,” the door was opened wider, and the man made a 
sign for me to follow him. I was led into a great mansion, 
perfectly dark, except for the lantern ahead, and I went 
up a marble staircase, and then into a large salon, fur¬ 
nished in the style of the French Empire, with portraits 
on the walls of eighteenth century ladies and gentlemen 
in silks and brocades. In such a room as this Marie 
Antoinette might have sat with her ladies before the 
women of the markets marched to Versailles. 

The old man servant touched a button, and flooded the 
room with the light of the electric candelabra, making 
sure first that no gleam of it would get through the heavy 
curtains over the shutters. Then he left the room, and 

140 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

soon afterward appeared an old lady in a black dress 
with a white shawl over her shoulders. 

She was the aunt of one of the great families of 
Portugal, some of whom had escaped to England, and 
others of whom were in the prisons of Lisbon. She 
spoke harshly, in French, of the base and corrupt char¬ 
acter of the new Portuguese Republic, and of the cruelties 
and indignities suffered by the political prisoners. She 
lived quite alone in the old mansion, not caring to go out 
because of the insults she would receive in the streets, 
but otherwise safe. So far, at least, Affonso Costa 
and his police had not threatened her liberty or her 
possessions. 

In another house in the outskirts of Lisbon, with a 
beautiful garden, where the warm air was filled with the 
scent of flowers in masses of rich color, I met another 
lady of the old regime^ a beautiful girl, living solitary, 
also, and agonized because of the imprisonment and ill 
treatment of her relatives. She implored me to use what 
influence I had, as an English journalist, to rescue those 
unhappy men. 

It was my mission to get into the prisons, and see what 
were the real conditions of captivity there. After fre¬ 
quent visits to the Foreign Office, I received permits to 
visit the Penetenciaria and the Limoero, in which most 
of the political prisoners were confined. The guide who 
went with me told me that the Republic had nothing to 
hide, and that I could see everything and talk as much 
as I liked with the captives. He was certain that I 
should find the Penetenciaria, at least, a model prison. 
The other was “rather old-fashioned.” 

On the whole, I preferred the old-fashioned prison. 
The “model prison” seemed to me specially and beau¬ 
tifully designed to drive men mad and kill their human¬ 
ity. It was spotlessly clean and provided with excellent 
sanitary arrangements, washhouses, bakehouses, kitchens, 

HI 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

and workshops, but the whole system of the prison was 
ingeniously and, to my mind, devilishly constructed to 
keep each prisoner, except a favored few, in perpetual 
solitude. Once put into one of those little white cells, 
down one of the long white corridors, and a man would 
never see or talk with a fellow mortal again until his 
term of penal servitude expired, never again, if he had 
a life sentence. There were men in that place who had 
already served ten, or fifteen, or twenty years. Through 
a hole in the door they received their food or their day’s 
ration of work. To exercise them, a trap was opened 
at the end of their cell, so that they could walk out, like 
a captive beast, into a little strip of courtyard, divided 
by high walls from the strip on either side. Up above 
was the open sky, and the sunlight fell aslant upon the 
white-coated walls, but it was a cramped and barren 
space for a man’s body and soul. Perhaps it was no 
worse than other European prisons, possibly much better. 
But it struck me with a cold horror, because of all those 
living beings isolated, in lifelong silence, entombed. 

One corridor was set apart for the political prisoners, 
and when I saw them they were allowed to have their cell 
doors open, and to converse with each other, for a short 
time. Otherwise they, too, were locked in their separate 
cells. I spoke with a number of them, all men of high- 
sounding names and titles, but a melancholy, pale, miser¬ 
able-looking crowd, whose spirits seemed quite broken 
by their long captivity. They were mostly young men, 
and among them was the Portuguese count who had led 
the counter-revolutionary rising and had been captured 
by the Republican troops. They had one grievance, of 
which they all spoke passionately. The Republic might 
have shot them as Royalists. At least that would have 
enabled them to die like gentlemen. But it had treated 
them like common criminals and convicts, and had even 
forced them to wear convict garb, to have their heads 

142 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

shaved, and to wear the hood with only eyeholes which 
was part of the dress—horrible in its cruelty—of all long- 
sentence men. My conversation with most of them was 
in French, but two young brothers of very noble family 
spoke excellent English. They seemed to regard my 
visit as a kind of miracle, and it revived hopes in them 
which made me pitiful, because I had no great expectation 
of gaining their release. When I went away from them, 
they returned to their cells, and the steel doors clanked 
upon them. 

In the prison called the Limoero there were different 
conditions of life, enormously preferable, I thought, to 
the Penetenciaria, in spite of its filth and dirt and disease. 
There was no solitary confinement here, but crowds of 
men and women living in a hugger-mugger way, with free 
intercourse between their rooms. They were allowed to 
receive visitors at stated times, and when I was there the 
wives of many of the prisoners had come, with their 
babies and parcels of food. The babies were crawling 
on the floor, the food was being cooked on oil stoves, and 
.there was a fearful stench of unwashed bodies, fried 
onions, tobacco smoke, and other strong odors. 

The Fleet Prison, as described by Charles Dickens, 
must have closely resembled this place, in its general 
system of accommodation and social life, and I saw in 
many faces there the misery, the haggard lines, the 
despair, which he depicts among those who had been long 
suffering inmates of that debtors’ jail. 

Many of the men here were of the aristocratic and 
intellectual classes, among them editors and corre¬ 
spondents of Royalist papers, poets, novelists, and univer¬ 
sity professors. They had not been charged with any 
crime, they had not been brought up for trial, they had 
no idea how long their captivity would last—a few 
months, a few years, or until death released them. But 
at least in equal proportion to the Royalists—I think in a 

143 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

majority—were men of poorer class—mechanics, printers, 
tailors, shoemakers, artisans of all kinds. They, too, 
were political prisoners, having been Socialists, Syn¬ 
dicalists, and other types of advanced democrats. 

Some of the men told me that they had no idea what¬ 
ever why they were lodged in Limoero. They had been 
arrested without charge, flung into prison without trial, 
and kept there without hope of release. Quite a number 
of them had been imprisoned by the Royalist regime in 
the time of the monarchy, and the Republic had not 
troubled about them. They were just left to rot, year 
after year. 

The political prisoners were allowed to receive food 
from their relatives, but many had no relatives able to 
provide them, and they had nothing but prison fare, 
which was hardly enough for life. They begged through 
the bars of the windows to passers-by, as I saw them, 
with their hands thrust through the iron gratings. Owing 
to the overcrowding and insanitary conditions, disease 
was rife, and prison fever ravaged them. 

I had been told of one prison called Forte Mon Santo, 
on a hill some distance away from Lisbon, and as I could 
get no official pass to visit it, I decided to try and gain 
admission by other means. In the Black Horse Square 
at Lisbon, I hired a motor car from one of the street 
drivers, and understood from him that he was the cham¬ 
pion automobilist of Lisbon. Certainly he drove like a 
madman and a brute. He killed three dogs on the way, 
not by accident, but by deliberately steering into them, 
and laughed uproariously at each kill. He drove through 
crowded streets with a screeching horn, and in the open 
countryside went like a fiend, up hill and down dale. I 
was surprised to find myself alive on the top of the hill 
which, as I knew by private directions, was the prison of 
Mon Santo. 

But I could see no prison. No building of any kind 

144 


I 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

stood on the lonely hilltop or on its slopes, which were 
bare of all but grass. All I could see was a circle of 
queer-looking objects like large metal mushrooms. Upon 
close inspection I saw that these things were ventilators 
for a subterranean building, and walking further, I came 
to a steep, circular ditch, into which some steps were cut. 

At the top of the steps stood a sentry with a rifle slung 
over his arm. 

I approached this man, who regarded me suspiciously 
and unslung his rifle, but the glint of a gold sovereign— 
we used to have such things before the era of paper 
money—persuaded him that I was an agreeable fellow. 
My brutal motor driver, who spoke a bit of French, so 
that he understood my purpose, explained to the sentry 
that I was an English tourist who would like to see his 
excellent prison. After some debate, and a roving eye 
over the surrounding landscape, the sentry nodded, and 
made a sign for me to go down the steps, with the motor 
driver. I noticed that during all the time of my visit he 
walked behind us, with his rifle handy, lest there should 
be any trick on our part. 

It was the most awful dungeon I have ever seen, apart 
from ancient dens disused since mediaeval times. Com¬ 
pletely underground, its dungeons struck me with a chill 
even in the short time I was there. Its walls oozed with 
water. No light came direct through the narrow bars 
of the cells in which poor wretches lay like beasts, but only 
indirectly from the surrounding ditch, so that they were 
almost in darkness. In the center of this underground 
fort was a cavern in complete darkness except, perhaps, 
for some faint gleam through a grating about two feet 
square, high up in the outer wall. It was just a hole 
in the rock, and inside were five men with heavy chains 
about them. Once a day the jailers pushed some loaves 
of bread through the grating. What went on in that 
dark dungeon, and in the darkness of those men’s souls, 


145 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

it is better, perhaps, not to imagine. The cruelty of men 
is not yet killed, and there are still, in the hearts of men 
and of nations, lurking devils worse than the wildness 
and ferocity of beasts. . . . 

I went to other prisons in Lisbon and Oporto. They 
were not like that, but, generally, like the Limoero, un¬ 
clean, squalid, horrible, but with human companionship, 
which alleviates all suffering, if there is any kind of com¬ 
radeship. In these cases one could not charge the Portu¬ 
guese Republic with inflicting bodily suffering upon their 
prisoners in any deliberate way. The indictment against 
them was that, under the fair name of liberty, they had 
overthrown the monarchical regime and substituted a 
new tyranny. For, among all the people I met, there 
were few who had been charged with any offense against 
the law, or given the right of defense in any trial. 

A queer fellow came into my life during this time in 
Portugal, whose behavior still baffles me by its mystery. 
The episode is like the beginning of a sensational detec¬ 
tive story, without any clue to Its solution. 

The first night of my arrival In Lisbon I dined alone 
In the hotel, and soon remarked a handsome, well-dressed, 
English-looking man who kept glancing in my direction. 
After dinner he came up to me and said: “Excuse me, but 
isn’t your name Jones? I think I had the pleasure of 
meeting you In London, some months ago?” 

“A mistake,” I said, civilly; “my name Is not Jones.” 

He looked disappointed when I showed no signs of 
desiring further conversation, and went away. But pres¬ 
ently, after studying the hotel list (as I have no doubt), 
he returned, and with a very genial smile, said: “Oh, 
forgive me I I made a mistake in the name. You are 
Philip Gibbs, I believe. I met you at the Savage Club.” 

I knew he was lying, for I seldom forget a face, and 
not such a face as his, very powerful and arresting, but 
as I was bored with my own company, I gave him a little 

146 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

rope. We took coffee together, and talked about the 
affairs of the world and the countries in which we had 
wandered. He had been to South America and other 
countries, and told me some very amusing yarns. I was 
much taken with this man, who was certainly well-edu¬ 
cated and a brilliant talker. 

The mystery appeared when he tapped at my door 
next morning, and said he desired to ask a favor. 

I expected him to borrow money, but what he wanted 
was less expensive, and more extraordinary. He wanted 
me to go to the seashore near Cascaes and bring back 
to him a handful of pebbles. As he could not pay for 
such a service from a man in my position, he would gladly 
make me a friendly gift of anything that might strike 
my fancy in the shops of Lisbon. 

No questioning of mine as to the meaning of this 
extraordinary request brought any explanation. He re¬ 
gretted that he could not enlighten me as to his reason, 
but for him the matter was of vital importance. I utterly 
refused to fetch the pebbles or to go anywhere near the 
seashore. It flashed across my mind that this very hand¬ 
some, English-looking gentleman might be a police spy 
set to dog my footsteps. He certainly dogged me all 
right. I could hardly get away from him, wherever I 
went, and he pressed me to take wine with him at the 
open-air cafes. One night when we sat together in Black 
Horse Square, he became uneasy, and kept glancing over 
his shoulder at the crowded tables. Presently he rose, 
and said, “Let us take a stroll.” I agreed, and was 
quickly aware that we were being followed by three men. 

I spoke to him. 

“One of us is being shadowed. Is it you or me?” 

“Me,” he said. “As long as you stay with me, I am 
safe. Let us slip into this place. . . .” ^ 

He pushed open the swing door of a wine shop, and we 
went inside. He ordered a bottle of cheap wine, and 

H7 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

before it had been brought, three men entered and sat 
near the door. 

My strange acquaintance sipped a little wine, spoke to 
me loudly in English about the weather, and whispered 
the words, “Follow me quickly I” 

He rose from the table, and went rapidly out of the 
back door of the restaurant into the courtyard, and out 
through a side door into the street by which we had 
entered. It was dark, but as we walked we saw, at the 
end of the street, under a lantern, three men standing 
motionless. 

“Hell I” said my acquaintance. 

He plunged into a narrow alley, and then through a 
labyrinth of little streets until suddenly we emerged on 
the square opposite our hotel. 

“How’s that for geographical knowledge?” he asked. 

“Good!” I said. “But after this I do not desire your 
company. I don’t understand why these men followed 
you, and I don’t like the game, anyhow.” 

He regretted my annoyance, and was so polite and 
amusing that I relented toward him, especially as he told 
me he was going to Vigo next day. 

He wished me good-by that night when he went to bed. 
But next morning when I left Lisbon for Oporto, he was 
on the platform, and said that he had changed his plans 
and was going to the same place as myself. 

I was now convinced that he was really shadowing me, 
and told him so. But he shook his head and laughed. 

“Nothing of the kind. I like your company, because 
you’re the only Englishman in this land of dagoes. Also 
I want you to get me that handful of pebbles.” 

He returned again to the subject of those ridiculous 
pebbles. I could get them easily for him on the seashore 
by Oporto. It would give me very little trouble. It would 
be an enormous favor to him. ... I refused to consider 
the idea. 


148 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

In Oporto he took me into a jeweler’s shop and bought 
a little cedarwood box about five inches square. 

“I want enough pebbles to fill this box,” he said. 
“Surely you can get them for me?” 

Surely you can get them yourself,” I answered. 

But he shook his head, and said that was impossible. 

We were again followed down the streets of Oporto. 
My companion drew my attention to the fact, and then 
sidestepped into an umbrella shop. But he did not buy 
an umbrella. He bought a very neat, and rather expen¬ 
sive, sword stick, and offered to give me another like it. 

“It may be useful,” he remarked. 

I declined the sword stick, but accepted the thick 
cudgel which he had been carrying since I knew him. 

That is practically, the end of the story. He left 
Oporto two days later, and before going made one last 
request. It was that I should send a telegram which he 
had written out, to an address in South Kensington. It 
was to the following effect: 

rriving in London Saturday. Cannot get the pebbles J* 

What is the meaning of that mystery? I cannot give 
a guess, and have sometimes thought of offering the 
problem to Conan Doyle. 

Sometimes, also, I have wondered whether it is in any 
way connected with an incident that took place in the 
abandoned palace of King Manuel, or rather, in his 
garden. From the newspaper reports it appeared that 
some of the royal jewels had been buried before the flight 
of King Manuel. Perhaps it was for the purpose of 
digging for them that three men, of whom one was be¬ 
lieved to be an Englishman, had entered the palace garden 
on the night of my arrival in Lisbon. A sentry had dis¬ 
covered them and fired. The men fired- back, and the 
sentry was wounded, before they escaped over the wall. 

Was that man “believed to be an Englishman” my mys¬ 
terious acquaintance? I am tempted to think so, yet I 

149 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

cannot provide a theory for the pebbles from the sea¬ 
shore, the jewel box, the shadowing in the streets of 
Lisbon, the purchase of the sword stick, and the eager¬ 
ness for my company. 

All that has nothing to do with the political prisoners 
and my mission of inquiry. The end of that story is that 
after the publication of my articles in The Daily Chron¬ 
icle^ and many papers on the Continent, Affonso Costa 
declared a general amnesty and the prison doors were 
unlocked for a great “jail-delivery” of Royalists. 

How far my articles had any influence toward that 
action, I do not know. Certainly I received some share 
in the credit, and for months afterward there were Portu¬ 
guese visitors at my little house in Holland Street, to 
kiss my hand—as the deliverer of their relatives and 
friends—much to the amusement of my wife. 

But the real deliverer of the prisoners was little Miss 
Tenison, who had pulled all the wires from her haunted 
house. 


150 


XII 


E ver since I can remember I have lived in the com¬ 
pany of men and women of a “literary” turn of 
mind, who either gained a livelihood by writing or used 
their pens as a means of augmenting other forms of 
income. My memory, therefore, is a long portrait gal¬ 
lery of authors, novelists, and journalists, many of whom, 
however, as I must immediately confess, were utterly 
unknown to fame, and entirely without fortune. 

My own father was an essayist and novelist In his spare 
time as a Civil Servant In the Board of Education, where, 
in those good old days of leisured life, he worked from 
eleven till four—not, I suspect, in a very exacting way. 
Anyhow, It was noticed by his sons that whenever they 
called upon him in his office, he was either washing his 
hands, or discussing life and literature with his colleagues. 
A man of overflowing Imagination, enormous range of 
reading, passionate Interest In all aspects of humanity, 
and most vivacious wit and eloquence. It was a brutal 
tragedy that he should have been fettered to the soul- 
destroying drudgery of a government office. But he 
gathered round him many worshipful friends, and was a 
popular figure In one of the oldest literary haunts of 
London, still “going strong” as The Whitefriars Club. 

As a young boy in an Eton collar, I used to dine with 
him there, filled with reverence and delight because I sat 
at table with the literary giants of the day. To my father, 
whose genial Imagination exaggerated the genius of his 
friends, they were all “giants,” but I expect the world, 
and even Fleet Street, has forgotten most of them by 
now. To me, the greatest of them were G. A. Henty, a 

151 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

grand old man with a beard like Father Christmas, who 
rewrote French and English history in delectable romance 
—does anyone read him now?—George Manville Fenn, 
the author of innumerable books of which I cannot re¬ 
member a single title—O, fleeting time !—and Ascot 
Hope Moncrieff, who, under his first two names, was 
the very first editor of The Boy^s Own Paper —surely a 
thousand years ago!—and the author of the most en¬ 
trancing boys’ books, and many serious and scholarly 
volumes. 

This fine old man, who is still producing books, was 
our intimate friend at home, in early days, when a great 
family of brothers and sisters, of whom I came fifth, 
welcomed him with real honor and affection. 

Another of my father’s friends, whom I used to think 
the wisest man in the whole world, was a little old gentle¬ 
man of the distinguished name of Smith, who died the 
other day (getting a paragraph in The Times) ^ having 
devoted his whole life to a work on The Co-ordination of 
Knowledge. It was his simple and benign ambition to 
classify every scrap of knowledge since the beginning of 
the world’s history to the present time, by a card index 
system. He died, after fifty years of labor, with that 
task uncompleted I 

I had the opportunity of meeting one'character at The 
Whitefriars’ Club, who is still famous in Fleet Street, 
though he is like an ancient ghost. This was an old 
Shakespearian actor named O’Dell, who used to play the 
part of the gravedigger in “Hamlet,” and the clown in 
“As You Like It,” sixty years and more ago. Under the 
title of “The Last of the Bohemians,” he had a privileged 
place at the Whitefriars, which he was always the last 
man to leave for some unknown destination, popularly 
supposed to be a seat on the Thames Embankment be¬ 
cause of his extreme penury. He wore a sombrero hat 
and a big black cloak in the old style of tragic actors. It 

152 



ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

was this costume and his ascetic face which led to a bet 
between the conductor and driver of an old horse bus 
passing down Fleet Street, before the time of motor cars. 

“I say, Bill,” said the conductor, “who d’yer think we 
’ave aboard?” 

“Dunno,” said the driver. 

“Cardinal Manning I S’welp me Bob I” 

“No blooming fear I That ain’t the Cardinal.” 

“Well, I’ll bet a tanner on it.” 

At the Adelphi the conductor leaned over O’Dell as 
he descended with grave dignity, and said: 

“Beg yer pardon, sir, but do you ’appen to be Cardinal 
Manning?” 

“Go ta hell and burn there!” said O’Dell in his sepul¬ 
chral voice. 

Joyously the conductor mounted the steps and called 
to the driver. 

“I’ve won that bet. Bill. It is ’is ’Oliness!” 

There are many such stories about O’Dell, who had a 
biting wit and a reckless tongue. He is now, like Colonel 
Newcome in his last years, a Brother of the Charterhouse, 
in a confraternity of old indigent gentlemen who say 
their prayers at night and dine together in hall. Among 
the historic characters of Fleet Street he will always have 
a place and I am glad to have met that link between the 
present and the past. 

Among my literary friends as a young man was, first 
and foremost—after my father, who was always inspir¬ 
ing and encouraging—my own brother, who reached the 
heights of success (dazzling and marvelous to my youth¬ 
ful eyes) under the name of Cosmo Hamilton. 

After various flights and adventures, including a brief 
career on the stage, he wrote a book called Which is 
Absurd, and after it had been rejected by many publishers, 
placed it on the worst possible terms with Fisher Unwin. 
It made an immediate hit, and refused to stop selling. 

153 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

After that success he went straight on without a check, 
writing novels, short stories, and dramatic sketches which 
established him as a new humorist, and then, achieving 
fortune as well as fame, entered the musical comedy 
world with “The Catch of the Season,” “The Beauty of 
Bath,” and other great successes, which he is still main¬ 
taining with unabated industry and invention. He and I 
were close “pals,” as we still remain, and, bad form as 
it may seem to write about my brother, I honestly think 
there are few men who have his prodigality of imagina¬ 
tion, his overflowing storehouse of plots, ideas, and 
dramatic situations, his eternal boyishness of heart— 
which has led him into many scrapes, given him hard 
knocks, but never taught him the caution of age, or 
moderated his sense of humor—his wildness of exag¬ 
geration, his generous good nature, or the sentiment and 
romance which he hides under the laughing mask of a 
cynic. In character he and I are the poles apart, but I 
owe him much in the way of encouragement, and his praise 
has always been first and overwhelming when I have 
made any small success. As a young man I used to think 
him the handsomest fellow in England, and I fancy I 
was not far wrong. 

As a journalist, it was natural that my most familiar 
friends should be of that profession, and therefore not 
necessarily famous as men of letters, unless they broke 
away from the limitations of newspaper work. They are 
still those for whom I have most affection—H. W. Nevin- 
son, Beach Thomas, Percival Phillips, H. M. Tomlinson, 
Robin Littlewood the dramatic critic; Ernest Perris, 
editor of The Daily Chronicle; Bulloch, editor of The 
Graphic; all good men and true, and others less renowned. 

One comrade who has “gone west,” as they used to 
say in time of war, was a brilliant young Jew named 
Alphonse Courlander. I used to meet him, at home and 
abroad, on all sorts of missions, and wherever we were, 

154 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

we used to get away from the crowd to talk of the books 
we were going to write (and for the most part never 
wrote!) and the latest masterpieces we had discovered. 
Alphonse had more of a Latin than a Jewish tempera¬ 
ment, with irresistible gayety and wit, which concealed a 
profound melancholy. It was when he had drunk one 
glass too much, or perhaps two, that his melancholy 
surged up, and he used to shed tears over his poor little 
naked soul. Otherwise, he had gifts of comic speech and 
mimicry, which used to make me laugh outrageously, 
sometimes in the most solemn places. One trick of his 
was to make the face of a codfish, which was beyond 
all words funny, and in order to upset my gravity, he 
used to do this in the presence of royalty, or at some 
heavy political function, or even during a walk down 
Pall Mall. 

I remember one night in Ireland, when we supped with 
a party of Irish journalists in a little eating house called 
Mooney’s Oyster Bar. A young Irish girl was playing 
the fiddle in the courtyard outside, and we called her in, 
and bribed her to play old Irish ballads, which are so 
pitiful with the old tragedy of the race that Alphonse the 
Jew was touched to his heartstrings and vowed that he 
was descended from the kings of Ireland. 

He was with me during the episode in Copenhagen 
with Doctor Cook, in whom he had a passionate and 
chivalrous belief, until I shook his faith so much that he 
sent messages to his paper saying that Cook was a liar, 
and then later messages to say that he wasn’t. Cour- 
lander could write in any kind of style which impressed 
his imagination for a time, and his novels ranged from 
imitations of Thomas Hardy and R. L. Stevenson, to 
W. W. Jacobs. But his best book—really fine—was a 
novel on Fleet Street called Mightier Than the Sword, 
when he wrote about the things he knew and felt. In 
giving me a copy, he was generous enough to write that 

155 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I was its godfather, through my own novel The Street 
of Adventure. Poor Alphonse Courlander was a victim 
of war’s enormous agony, and his end was tragic, but in 
Fleet Street he left no single enemy, and many friends. 

For several years while I was in Fleet Street, I lived 
opposite Battersea Park, in a row of high dwellings 
stretching for about a mile, and called Overstrand Man¬ 
sions, Prince of Wales Mansions, and York Mansions. 
Nearly all the people in the road were of literary, artistic, 
or theatrical avocations, either hoping to arrive at fame 
and fortune, or reduced in circumstances after brief glory. 
The former class were in the great majority, and were 
youngish people, with youngish wives, and occasionally, 
but not often, a baby on the balcony. G. K. Chesterton, 
who lived in the Overstrand Mansions, immediately over 
my head—I used to pray to God that he would not fall 
through—once remarked that if he ever had the good 
fortune to be shipwrecked on a desert island, he would 
like it to be with the entire population of the Prince of 
Wales Road, whom he thought the most interesting col¬ 
lection of people in the world. I thought so, too, and 
wrote a very bad novel about them, called Intellectual 
Mansions, S. JV. That book appeared in the time of the 
militant suffragettes who were playing hell in London, 
and as my chief lady character happened to be a suf¬ 
fragette, they claimed it as their own, bought up the whole 
edition, bound it in their colors of purple, green, and 
white, and killed it stone dead. 

I came to know G. K. Chesterton at that time, and 
every time I saw him admired more profoundly his great 
range of knowledge, his immense wit and fancy, his 
genial, jolly, and passionately sincere idealism. From my 
ground-floor flat, every morning at ten I used to observe 
a certain ritual in his life. There appeared an old han¬ 
som cab, with an old horse and an old driver. This 
would be kept waiting for half an hour. Then G. K. C. 

156 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

would descend, a spacious and splendid figure in a big 
cloak and a slouch hat, like a brigand about to set forth 
on a great adventure, and though he was bound no 
further than Fleet Street, it was adventure enough, lead¬ 
ing to great flights of fancy and derring do. After him 
came Mrs. Chesterton, a little figure almost hidden by her 
husband s greatness. When Chesterton got into the cab, 
the old horse used to stagger in its shafts, and the old 
cab used to rock like a boat in a rough sea. 

At luncheon time I often used to see G. K. C. in an 
Italian restaurant in Fleet Street where, with a bottle of 
port wine at his elbow, and a scribbling pad at his side, 
he used to write one of his articles for The Daily News, 
chuckling mightily over some happy paradox, which had 
just taken shape in his brain, and totally unconscious of 
any public observation of his private mirth. 

As literary editor of The Tribune, I tried to buy Ches¬ 
terton away from The Daily News, at double the price 
they paid him, but he was proof against this temptation. 
^^The Daily News has been very good to me,” he said, 
“and though I loathe their point of view on many sub¬ 
jects, I’m not going to desert them now.” He agreed, 
however, to contribute to The Tribune from time to time, 
and as I had arranged the matter, he had a kindly feel¬ 
ing toward me which led to an embarrassing but splendid 
moment in my life. At a preliminary banquet given by 
the proprietor of that unfortunate paper to a crowd of 
distinguished people who utterly neglected to buy it, 
G. K. Chesterton sat, as one of the chief guests, at the 
high table. I had been obscurely placed at the back of 
the room, and this distressed the noble and generous soul 
of my good friend. When he was asked to speak, he 
made some general and excellent observations, and then 
uttered such a panegyric of me that I was dissolved in 
blushes, especially when he raised his glass and asked the 
company to drink to me. Some of them, including the 

157 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

proprietor, were not altogether pleased with this demon¬ 
stration in my favor, but, needless to say, I cherish it. 

Among my happy recollections of G. K. C. is one day 
at luncheon hour when he was “guyed” by a group of 
factory girls in Fleet Street, and took their playfulness 
with jovial humor, careless of his dignity; and an eve¬ 
ning at the Guildhall when King Albert of Belgium was 
the guest, and I encountered Chesterton afterward wan¬ 
dering in the courtyard like the restless ghost of a roister¬ 
ing cavalier, afraid to demand his hat from the flunkeys, 
because he had not the necessary shilling with which to 
tip them. 

Chesterton is one of the great figures of literary Eng¬ 
land, and will live in the history of our own time as one 
of the wittiest and wisest men, worthy of a place in the 
portrait gallery of the immortals. His great figure, his 
overflowing humor, his splendid simplicity of faith in the 
ancient code of liberty and truth, put him head and 
shoulders above the standardized type of little “intel¬ 
lectuals” with whom the world is crowded. 

I have the pleasantest recollections of “Intellectual 
Mansions,” Battersea Park, but, after living there for 
four years or so, I moved over the bridge to the little 
house I have already mentioned, in Holland Street, Ken¬ 
sington, a few yards away from the old world Paradise, 
Kensington Gardens. It was a little house in a little street, 
which I still think the most charming in London, with 
fine old Georgian mansions mixed up with little old shops, 
so that an admiral lived next to a chimney sweep, and 
that great artist, Walter Crane, was two doors or so 
removed from an oil and colorman, who sold everything 
from treacle to paraffin. We had everything in Holland 
Street that adds to the charm of life—a public house at 
the corner, a German band which played all the wrong 
notes once a week, just as it ought to do, and a Punch 
and Judy show. 





ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

A near neighbor and close friend of mine at that time 
was E. W. Hornung, the author of Raffles and many 
better books not so famous. He was the brother-in-law of 
Conan Doyle, whose enormous success with Sherlock 
Holmes probably set his mind working on the character 
of that gentlemanly thief, Raffles, with whom, personally, 
I had no sympathy at all. 

Hornung and I used to “jaw” about books and writ¬ 
ing, and, as an obscure journalist and unsuccessful author, 
I used to stand in awe of his fine house, his powerful 
motor car, his son at Eton. He was a heavily built man, 
with a lazy manner and a certain intolerance of view 
which made him despise Socialists, radicals, or any critics 
of the British Empire and the old traditions, but I came 
to know the underlying sweetness and sentiment of his 
character, and his passion of patriotism. He used to 
drive me sometimes to places like Richmond Park and 
Windsor Forest, and there we used to walk about under 
the trees, discussing the eternal subject of books. Deep 
peace was about us in those old woods. Neither he nor 
I imagined in our wildest flights of fancy that one day 
he would be living in a hole in the ground under the ruins 
of Arras, and that life and death would knock all thought 
of books out of our minds. 

His boy was his greatest pride, a fine lad, fresh from 
Eton, and steeped in the old traditions which Hornung 
thought gave the only grace to the code of an English 
gentleman. (He had no patience with any other school 
of thought.) The boy stood one day on the curbstone in 
High Street Kensington, on a day after war had been 
declared and the streets were placarded with posters, 
“Your King and Country Need You.” He raised his hat 
to my wife, and said, “Do you think I ought to join up?” 
He joined up, like all boys of his age, and, like most of 
them in the list of second lieutenants, at that time, was 
killed very soon. His letters from the front were full of 

159 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

faith and pride. He loved his men, the splendor of 
being an officer, the thought of the great adventure ahead 
for England’s sake. He did not live into the times of 
disillusion and the dull routine of mud and misery. . . . 

His father was broken-hearted. His only idea now was 
how to get out to the front, in spite of being too old 
for soldiering, and too heavy, and too asthmatical. It 
was my idea that he should join the Y.M.C.A., and he 
seized it gladly as a chance of service and heart healing. 
I met him in his hut at Arras, serving out tea to muddy 
Tommies, finding a man, now and then, to his enormous 
joy, who knew his son. Always he was in the spiritual 
presence of that boy of his. For the sake of that, and 
for the men’s sake, he endured real agonies of physical 
discomfort in a drafty hut, with a stove which would not 
burn, and cocoa as his only drink. The fastidious author 
of Raffles, who had been particular about his creature 
comforts, and careful of the slightest draft! 

He started a lending library for soldiers in the trenches, 
and I lent him a hand with it now and then. It was in a 
hut on the ruins of the Town Hall of Arras and because 
of the daily bombardment, he slept at night in a dugout 
below an avalanche of stones. I promised to give a lec¬ 
ture to his men on the history of Arras, and “mugged it 
up” from old books in an old chateau. The date was 
announced, and posted up on a placard. It was the 2ist 
of March, 1918! No British soldier needs reminding 
of the meaning of that date. It was when 114 German 
divisions attacked the British line and all hell was let 
loose, and, for a time, the bottom seemed to fall out of 
the world. 

I did not deliver that lecture. I was away at the south 
of the line, recording frightful happenings. But I heard 
afterward, from Hornung, that through the smoke and 
dust of heavy shelling which churned up old rubbish heaps 
of ruins in Arras, two Scottish soldiers in tin hats loomed 
up to hear the lecture. . . . Poor Hornung survived the 

160 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

war, but not long. His soul was eager for that meeting 
with his son. 

One visitor of mine in the little house in Holland 
Street, which was often overcrowded with a mixed com¬ 
pany of writers, artists, and odd folk, was a distinguished 
little man who came only when there was no one else 
about.^ At least, he preferred it that way, using my house 
as a little retreat from the madding world. This was 
Monsignor Hugh Benson, the famous preacher and 
novelist. The son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, he 
had shocked his family by joining the Catholic Church, 
in which he found perpetual adventure and delight. He 
loved its ritual, its color, its legends, its romance, its his¬ 
tory, its music, and its faith, like a small child in a big 
old house constantly discovering new wonders, mysteries, 
and enchanting treasures. . He had the heart of a boy, 
and an enthusiasm for life and work which would not let 
him take any rest. As a preacher, he was constantly flying 
about the country for special sermons and missions, and 
he preached, or, as he used to say, “praught,” with a 
passion that almost choked him and tore him to pieces. 
In spite of a painful little stutter, and intense shyness, 
he was extraordinarily eloquent, and every sermon was 
crammed with hard thinking, for he did not rely on senti¬ 
ment for his effect, but on sheer intellectual reasoning. 

That was only one part of his day’s work. He had an 
enormous correspondence with people of all denomina¬ 
tions or none, who used to write to him for advice and 
help, and every letter he received he answered as though, 
his own life depended on it. 

At my house he used to go to his bedroom at ten o’clock 
to deal with the day’s budget. But when that was done 
with, he used to get out a manuscript book and begin to 
enjoy himself. That was when he was writing one of his 
novels—and as soon as one was finished, he began 
another. 

i6l 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

“My dearest dream of Heaven,” he told me once, “is 
to be writing a novel which goes well and is never finished. 
What more perfect bliss than that?” 

Among his other passions—and all he liked he loved— 
was music, and he used to strike wonderful chords on my 
piano, and one particular combination of notes which he 
called the “deep sea chord,” because, if you shut your 
eyes and listened, you could hear deep waters rushing 
overhead! 

He killed himself by overwork, and I heard of his 
death when I was crossing a field outside Dixmude, which 
was a blazing ruin, in the autumn of the first year of war. 

He used to envy my place in Fleet Street, and say that 
if he were not a priest, he would like to be a journalist. 


XIII 


I T is most astonishing as a reminder of the rapid 
progress of mechanical science during the past twenty- 
one years that a journalist like myself, still young, and 
almost a babe compared with veterans of Fleet Street still 
on active service, should have seen the first achievements 
In aviation, the first motor cars plying for hire In the 
streets, and the first moving pictures—three Inventions 
that have changed our human destiny and mentality In an 
Incalculable way, and the last not least. 

It was, I think, in 1900 that I encountered the first 
motor “taxi” In Paris, one of those rattle-bone machines 
which, as far as Paris is concerned, have not Improved 
enormously since that time. But It seemed nothing short 
of a miracle' then, and It was not until several years later 
than they ousted the dear old hansom of London, which 
now survives only as a historical relic. 

It is dIfEcult to think back to the time when the kllp- 
klop of horses’ hoofs was the most characteristic noise 
of London by night, when one sat in quiet rooms above 
the street. It had a sound of Its own, and a touch of 
romance which Is missed by the older generation, accus¬ 
tomed now to the honking of motor horns. The younger 
generation cannot Imagine life without that trumpeting. 

I remember being sent by my paper to describe a night 
journey In a motor car as a new and exciting adventure, 
as It certainly was to me at that time when I traveled 
down to the Lands End, and saw, for the first time, the 
white glare of headlights on passing milestones and be¬ 
wildered cattle, and passed through little sleeping vil¬ 
lages where the noise of our coming was heard as a por- 

163 



ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

tent, by people who jumped out of bed and stared through 
the window blinds. In those days a man who owned a 
car was regarded as a very rich and adventurous fellow, 
as well as something of a freak, and he was ridiculed 
with immense enjoyment by pedestrians when he was dis¬ 
covered, frequently, lying in the mud beneath his machine 
which had hopelessly broken down. Indeed, many people 
had a passionate hostility to motorists and motoring, and 
a great friend of mine so hated the sight of an automo¬ 
bile that he used to throw stones after them. He was a 
rich man, with carriages and horses, which he vowed he • 
would never abandon for “a filthy, stinking motor car.” 
Now he never moves a yard without one. I am the only 
consistent enemy of motor cars left in the world. I hate 
them like poison. 

For professional purposes, however, I have been a. 
great motorist, and I suppose that during the four and a 
half years of war I must have covered sixty thousand 
miles. I have hired motors in England, France, Italy, Portu¬ 
gal, Spain, Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia,-Turkey, 
Asia Minor, and the United States. I have had every sort 
of accident that may happen to a motorist this side of 
death. Wheels have come off and gone rolling ahead of 
me down steep hills. Axles have broken beneath me. I 
have been dashed into level crossing gates, I have escaped 
an express train by something like three inches, and I 
have had my car smashed to bits by a collison with a 
lorry which laid my right arm out of action for three 
months. 

Yet I was not such a “hoodoo” as a motorist as a de¬ 
lightful friend of mine named Coldstream. Whenever 
he sat in a motor car he used to expect something to 
happen to it, and it always did. The door handle would 
drop off, just as a preliminary warning. Then one of 
the cylinders would miss fire, as another sign of impend¬ 
ing disaster. Then the back axle would break, or some- 

164 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

thing would happen to prevent any further journey. Once, 
going with him from Arras to Amiens, we put two motor 
cars out of action, and then borrowed an ambulance, 
about ten miles from Amiens. After the first four miles 
it broke down hopelessly, and, finally, we had to walk the 
rest of the way. 

Moving pictures have caused something like a revolu¬ 
tion in social life, and on balance I believe they have 
been and are an immense boon to mankind—and woman¬ 
kind, especially in small country towns and villages which, 
until that invention, had no form of entertainment be¬ 
yond an occasional magic-lantern show, or “penny read¬ 
ing.” They bring romance and adventure to the farm 
laborer, the errand boy, the village girl, and the doctor’s 
daughter, and despite a lot of foolish stuff shown on the 
screen, give a larger outlook on life, and some sense of 
the beauty and grace of life, to the great masses. They 
give them also a comparison of the present with the past, 
and of one country with another. Perhaps in showing 
the contrast between one class and another, in extremes 
of luxury and penury, they are creating a spirit of social 
discontent which may have serious consequence—but that 
remains to be seen. 

I was an actor, for journalistic purposes, in one of the 
first film dramas ever produced in England. The first 
scene was an elopement by motor car, and the little com¬ 
pany of actors and actresses assembled in the front garden 
of a large empty mansion in a suburb in the southeast of 
London, namely Herne Hill. The heroine and the gen¬ 
tleman who played the part of her irate father entered 
the house, and disappeared. 

Meanwhile a number of business men of Herne Hill, 
on their way to work in the city, as well as various trades¬ 
men and errands boys, were astonished by the sight of 
two motor cars, half concealed behind the bushes in the 
drive, and by the group of peculiar-looking people, ap- 

165 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

parcntly engaged In some criminal enterprise. They were 
still more astonished and alarmed at the following events: 

(1) A good-looking youth advanced toward the 
house from a hiding place In the bushes, and threw peb¬ 
bles at a window of the house. 

(2) The window opened, and a beautiful girl ap¬ 
peared and wafted kisses to the boy below. Then 
disappeared. 

(3) The front door opened, and the beautiful girl 
rushed Into the arms of,the boy. After ardent embraces, 
he came with her to one of the motor cars, placed her 
Inside, and drove off at a furious pace. 

(4) Another window In the house opened, and an 
elderly gentleman looked out, waving his arms in obvious 
indignation, bordering on apoplexy. 

(5) Shortly afterward, he rushed out of the front 
door after the departing motor car (which had made 
several false starts), with clenched fists, and the 
words, “My God I My God! . . . My daughter! My 
daughter!” 

By this time the Herne Hill Inhabitants gathered at 
the gate were excited and distressed. One gentleman 
shouted loudly for the police. Another chivalrously re¬ 
marked that he was no spoil-sport, and If the girl wanted 
to elope. It was none of their business. A fox terrier 
belonging to the butcher boy, ran, barking furiously, at 
the despairing father, who was still panting down the 
drive. Then the usual policeman strolled up and said, 
“What’s all this ’ere?” Explanation and laughter fol¬ 
lowed. Nothing like It had ever been seen before In 
respectable Herne Hill, but they had heard of the cinema 
and its amazing drama. So this was how it was done! 
Well, well! 

Astonishing things happened In that early film drama, 
as old as the hills now, but novel and sensational then. 
The irate father giving chase in another powerful motor, 

166 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

(which moved at about ten miles an hour) was arrested 
by bogus policemen with red noses, thrown off the scent 
by comic tramps, and finally blown up in an explosion of 
the car, creating terror in a Surrey village, which thought 
that anarchists were loose. After many further incidents 
the runaway couple were married in a little old church— 
I walked in front of the camera as one of the guests— 
while two of the actors were posted as spies to give 
warning of any approach of the country clergyman. He, 
dear man, appeared in the opposite direction, and was 
horrified to find a wedding going on without his knowl¬ 
edge, and an unknown parson (who had dressed behind 
a hedge) officiating in the most unctuous way. For me 
it was a day of unceasing laughter, for there was some¬ 
thing enormously ludicrous about the surprise of the 
passers-by, who could not guess at what was the real 
meaning of the mock drama. Now it is a commonplace, 
and no one is surprised when a company of film actors 
takes possession of the road. 

Looking back upon the almost miraculous progress of 
aviation, it seems to me, and to many others, that hu¬ 
manity rose very high and fell very low when it dis¬ 
covered at last the secret of flight. For thousands of 
years, perhaps from the days when primitive man stood 
in a lonely world and watched the easy grace, the swift 
and joyous liberty of the birds above his head, there has 
been in the soul of man the dream of that power to fly. 
Men lost their lives in vain attempts, as far back as the 
myth of Icarus, whose waxed wings melted in the sun. 
Scientists studied the mechanism of birds, tethered their 
imagination to rising kites, sought vainly for the power 
to lift a heavy body from the earth. At last it was found 
in the petrol-driven engine, and men were seen to rise 
higher than the clouds, and to tra^vel through the great 
spaces of the sky like gods. A pity that this achievement 
xame just in time for world war, and that the power and 

167 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

beauty of flight was used for dropping death upon 
crowded cities and the armies of youth, crouching in 
ditches beneath those destroying dragons! 

I had no clear vision of that, in spite of the wonderful 
prophecy of H. G. Wells, when I watched the first feeble 
attempts of the early aviators in England and France. 
Those first aviation meetings did not promise mastery of 
the air except by the eye of faith. For hours, and some¬ 
times for days, we waited on the edge of flat fields while 
men like Graham White, Latham, Bleriot, Hamel, and 
other pioneers whose names, alas! I have forgotten— 
there is something terrible and tragic in that quick for¬ 
getfulness of heroic adventure—tinkered with their ma¬ 
chines, stared at the wind gauge, would not risk the light 
breeze that blew, or rose a little, after running like lame 
ducks around the field, and crashed again like wounded 
birds. Death took a heavy toll of them. There was 
hardly one of those early meetings in which I did not 
see one or more fatal accidents. 

I was close to the Hon. Charles Rolls, a very gallant 
and splendid fellow, when he fell. That was at the 
meeting in Bournemouth which I have mentioned before, 
when the Mayor challenged noonday itself in an artificial 
nose, and everybody seemed bewitched by some spell of 
midsummer madness. There was a flower carnival in 
progress and pretty girls all in white and sprigged muslin, 
mounted on floral cars, flung confetti and bouquets at 
the crowd, who pelted them back. From the flying field, 
while this was going on, Charles Rolls rose in his machine 
to perform an evolution which had been set as a com¬ 
petition. It was a death trap at that period of flying, 
for he had to fly four sides of a small square, and then 
alight in the center of it. No breeze was stirring, or very 
little, and the sky was cloudless. But rising sharply to 
form one side of the square. Rolls’s machine side slipped 
and fell like a stone. His body lay there for a moment' 

i68 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

before the spectators were conscious of tragedy. Then 
they rushed toward him. ... A few yards away, the 
floral cars continued their procession, and the pretty 
girls pelted the laughing crowds with blossoms. 

That was later than the beginning of flight. The first 
time I realized the almost limitless possibilities of heavier- 
than-air machines was at Doncaster, when Colonel Cody 
was among the competitors. The Doncaster meeting 
had been a great failure from the public point of view. 
There was very little flying, owing to bad weather and 
elementary aeroplanes. The aviators sulked in their 
tents, and the gloomy atmosphere was deepened by some 
financial troubles of the organizers, so that the gate money 
was seized to liquidate their debts. At least, that was 
the rumor, as I remember it. But there was one cheerful 
man, every ready with a friendly word and jest. That 
was Colonel Cody who, after many kite-flying experi¬ 
ments, on behalf of the British government, which had 
failed to give him any financial aid, was putting the finish¬ 
ing touches to a homemade biplane, with the help of his 
son. It was a monstrous and clumsy affair. It had great 
struts of bamboo, an enormous spread of wing space, and 
a petrol tank weighing half a ton. This structure, which 
was tied up with string, and old wire, and bits of iron, 
was nicknamed St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Noah’s Ark, 
and all kinds of ridiculous names, by correspondents who 
did not believe in its powers of flight. But they loved 
to talk to old Cody, dressed like “Buffalo Bill” (though 
he was no relation of the original Colonel Cody of show¬ 
man fame), with long hair which he used to wind up 
under his hat and fasten with an enormous bodkin with 
which he also used to pick his teeth. I laughed loud and 
long at the first sight of his immense aeroplane, and 
refused to credit his childlike assertion that it would fly 
like a bird. But one morning early, he enlisted volun¬ 
teers to haul it out of its hangar and set its engine going 

• 169 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

with the noise of seven devils. “Poor old Cody!” said a 
friend of mine. “One might as well try to fly with a 
railway engine!” 

Hardly were the words out of his mouth, than the great 
thing rose, and not like a bird, but gracefully and gently 
as a butterfly, was wafted above our heads, and flew 
steadily across the field. We chased it, shouting and 
cheering. It seemed to us like a miracle. It was a 
miracle—man’s conquest of flight. 

Presently, after three minutes, I think, “something 
happened.” The great aeroplane staggered back, flagged, 
and took a nose-dive to earth, where it lay with its engine 
dug deep into the soil and a confusion of twisted wires 
and broken canvas about it. With two or three other 
men—among them a brilliant and well-remembered jour¬ 
nalist, Harold Ashton—I ran forward, breathlessly, and 
helped to drag Cody from beneath the wreckage, dazed 
and bloody, but not badly hurt. His first words were 
triumphant: “What did I tell you, boys? It flew like 
a bird!” 

It was patched up again, and flew again, until Cody 
was killed. He was truly one of the heroic pioneers, 
obstinate in faith, heavily in debt, unhelped by any soul, 
except that son of his who believed in “the old dad.” 
It was he who cured me of scepticism. After seeing 
his heavy machine fly around the course, I knew that the 
game had been won, and that one day, not one man, but 
many, might be carried in an aeroplane on great strong 
wings. 

Edgar Wallace, war correspondent, novelist, poet, and 
great-hearted fellow, was at Doncaster with Harold Ash¬ 
ton and others, and I remember we played poker, which 
was new to me, after the day’s work. The landlord of 
the inn in which we stayed watched the game for a few 
minutes, and saw Wallace scoop the pool with a royal 
flush. The old man’s eyes fairly bulged in his head. “It’s 

170 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

a great game, that!” he remarked, and insisted on taking 
a hand. Wallace had phenomenal luck with his hands 
and so raked the landlord’s money out of his pockets that 
he fled in dismay. “It’s a devil’s game I” was his final 
verdict. However, that has nothing to do with the 
triumph of flight, except on the part of the landlord. 

Another revelation of progress rapidly achieved hap¬ 
pened at Blackpool, which coincided with the Doncaster 
meeting. I went on from one to the other and found the 
weather at Blackpool frightful, from the point of view 
of flying. Rain poured down heavily, and the wind was 
violent—so savage, indeed, across the flat fields of the . 
flying ground that it uprooted the poles of the press tent 
and made the canvas flap like clothes hung out to dry on 
a gusty day. Before this pavilion finally collapsed in the 
gale, I used it as a writing place, and remember sitting 
there with Bart Kennedy, with our collars tucked up, 
trying to keep our paper dry and our tempers cool. Bart 
Kennedy who, as a young man, had tramped about the 
world, not as a literary adventurer but as a real vagabond 
of the old style, earning his bread by casual labor, dis¬ 
covered in later life the gift of words, which he used in a 
crude, forceful, ungrammatical, but somewhat biblical, 
style to describe his experiences of life in the wild places 
of the world, and the philosophy which he had extracted 
therefrom. He posed as a rebel and a man of primitive 
soul in the artificial environment of civilization, and was 
adopted by the Harmsworth Press as an amusing freak. 
Although he was conscious of his own pose, and played 
it for all it was worth, it was based on sincerity. He was 
truly a rebel and a natural man, with the honesty, bru¬ 
tality, simplicity, and courage of the backwoodsman. In 
that tent at Blackpool, I remember his talking to a 
carpenter who was trying to fix the tent poles. 

“Say, old friend, have you ever heard of Jack Cade?” 

The carpenter scratched his head, thoughtfully. 

171 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

“Can’t say I remember any lad of that name. He 
isn’t one of my pals.” 

“He was a carpenter like you,” said Bart Kennedy. 
“Lived five hundred years ago, and tried to gain liberty 
for the workingmen of England. An honest rebel, was 
Jack Cade. Why don’t you fellows learn the spirit of 
revolt? You’re all as tame as sheep, without the pluck 
of a louse.” 

The collapse of the tent interrupted this dialogue, in 
which “Bart,” as we called him, endeavored to raise 
rebellion against the British Constitution. 

There was “half a gale,” as seamen would have called 
it, with the wind at sixty miles an hour, and to the amaze¬ 
ment of the spectators, who had given up all hopes of 
watching a flight that day, an aviator mounted into the 
fury of the storm. It was Latham, the most dare-devil 
of the early adventurers of flight, the most passionate and 
ill-tempered of them. I think it was a kind of rage which 
made him go up that afternoon. He was “fed up” with 
waiting for moderate weather, and with the little ladies 
who surrounded him with adulation and rivalry, as many 
of those aviators were surrounded by girls who were 
their hero worshipers and their harpies. It was the most 
astounding flight that had been seen up to that time. 
Latham’s machine was like a frail craft in a rough sea. 
The wind furies shrieked, and tried to tear this thing 
to pieces. It staggered and strained, and seemed to be 
tossed like a bit of paper in that wild wind. At times the 
power of the engine seemed to be exactly equaled by the 
force of the wind, and it remained aloft, making no 
progress but shuddering, as it were, until Latham 
wrenched it round and evaded the direct blast. He flew 
at a terrific speed, with the wind behind him, rising and 
dipping with tilted wings, like a sea gull in a storm. The 
correspondents on the press stand went a little mad at 
the sight and rose and cheered hoarsely, with a sense of 

172 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

fear, because this man seemed to be courting death. We 
expected him to crash at any moment. One voice rose 
above all the others, and roared out words which I have 
never forgotten. “You splendid fool I Come down I 
Come down I” 

It was Barzini, the Italian correspondent, the most 
brilliant descriptive writer in the world. Like an Italian 
of the Medici family, with long nose and olive skin and 
dark liquid eyes, Latham’s heroic exploit stirred him 
to a passion of emotion, and tears poured down his face. 
His description of that flight was one of the finest things 
I have ever read. 

One of the most exciting episodes of those early days 
of record making was when Graham White competed 
with Paulhan in a race from London to Manchester. 
With Ernest Perris, the news editor of The Daily Chron¬ 
icle, and Rowan, one of the correspondents, I set out in 
a powerful motor car to follow the flight, which began 
shortly before dark. Graham White’s plan was to fly 
by night—the first time such an exploit had been at¬ 
tempted—and he thought that our headlights might help 
as some guide outside London. We lost him almost at 
once, and after a wild motor ride at a breakneck pace 
in the darkness, decided that we should never see him 
again. He had probably hit a tree, and was lying dead 
in some field. Many other correspondents had motored 
out, but we lost them all, and halted at the side of a 
lonely road where we heard voices shouting to each other 
in French. 

“Perhaps they are Graham White’s mechanics,” I said 
to Perris. 

This guess proved to be right, and upon inquiry from 
the men, we found that Graham White had had engine 
trouble, and had alighted in some garden not far from 
where we stood. 

It was a little country village, though I cannot recol- 

173 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

lect its name or whereabouts, and after tramping across 
fields, we saw a house with lights shining from all its 
windows. It was the village rectory, remote from the 
world and all the excitements of life, until, out of the 
darkness, a great bird had dropped into the garden, with 
the noise of a dragon. From the wings of the bird a 
young man, dirty, half-dazed, freezing cold, and drunk 
with fatigue, staggered out, banged at the door, and asked 
for food and a place to sleep. The clergyman’s wife and 
the clergyman’s daughter rose to the occasion, as English¬ 
women do in times of crisis. They dressed themselves, 
made some coffee, cooked some boiled eggs, lighted big 
fires, and unfroze the bird man. He was already abed, 
after a plea to be called at the first gleam of dawn, when 
we arrived. Presently other motorists arrived, all cold 
and hungry and muddy. The country rectory was invaded 
by these wild-looking people and the clergyman’s pretty 
daughter, with shining eyes, served us all with coffee and 
eggs, and seemed to enjoy the excitement as the greatest 
thing that had happened in her life. I have no recollec¬ 
tion of the clergyman. I dare say the poor man was 
bewildered by the sudden tumult in his house of peace, 
and left everything to his capable wife and the swift grace ' 
of his little daughter. 

Before the dawn Graham White was down from his 
bed, thoroughly bad-tempered and abominably rude, for 
which there was ample excuse, as word w^as brought that 
Paulhan was well ahead, although he, too, had dropped 
into a field. Perris and I urged him not to fly again 
before daybreak, but he told us to go to the devil, and 
insisted on getting away in the darkness. We took to the 
car again, waited until we heard the roar of Graham 
White’s engines, and saw him pass overhead like a great 
black bat. Then we chased him again, and lost him again. 
He came to earth with more engine trouble in a ploughed 
field not long after dawn. A little crowd of people 

174 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

gathered round him, and I saw some of the corre¬ 
spondents who had started from London at the same 
time as ourselves—now disheveled, pale, and dirty in the 
bleak dawn. One young man, belonging to the old Morn¬ 
ing Leader, I think, carried a red silk cushion. His car 
lay overturned in a ditch, but he still clung to the cushion, 
he told me, as his one hold on the actuality of life, which 
seemed nothing but a mad dream. 

Another historic event was the All-round-England race, 
which became a duel between two famous Frenchmen, 
Vedrennes and Beaumont. The first named was a rough, 
brutal, foul-mouthed mechanic, with immense courage 
and skill. The second was a naval officer of most charm¬ 
ing and gallant personality. Beaumont came back to 
Brooklands after his successful and wonderful flight, 
only a few minutes ahead of Vedrennes. A great crowd 
of men and women, in which there were a number of 
pretty ladies who had motored out early from London, 
had assembled at Brooklands to cheer the winner, but, as 
always among English crowds, their sympathy was ex¬ 
cited by the man who had just missed the first prize. 
When Vedrennes appeared in sight, there was a rush to 
meet him. He stepped out of his machine, and looked 
fiercely around. When some one told him that Beaumont 
had arrived first, he raised both his clenched fists and 
cried out a foul and frightful oath—fortunately in 
French. Then he burst into tears, and, looking round in 
a dazed way, asked if there was any woman who would 
kiss him. A little Frenchwoman in the crowd stepped 
shyly out, and Vedrennes flung his greasy arms about 
her and kissed her emotionally. It was characteristic of 
the French soul that in the moment of his tragic disap¬ 
pointment he should have sought a woman’s arms, like 
a boy who goes to his mother in distress. I have never 
forgotten that little episode, and I have seen similar 
things in time of war. 


175 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

It was Alfred Harmsworth and The Daily Mail which 
put up all the prizes for these record-making flights, and 
the man who was afterward Lord Northcliffe deserved 
all the honor he gained for his generous and farseeing 
encouragement of aviation. It was he who offered a big 
prize for a cross-Channel flight, which then sounded al¬ 
most beyond the bounds of possibility. Latham was the 
first favorite for that prize, and was determined to gain 
it. His first attempt was a failure, and he fell into the 
sea, and was picked up smoking a cigarette as he clung 
to the wreckage of his planes. After that, he established 
himself at the other side of the Channel, at a little place 
called Sangatte, near Calais, and waited for some im¬ 
provements to his engine, and favorable weather. 

Another competitor and pioneer, named Bleriot, was 
tinkering about with a monoplane on the same strip of 
coast, but nobody seemed to think much of his chances. 

The Daily Mail had an immense staff of correspondents 
on both sides of the Channel, and a wireless installation 
by which they could signal to each other. Without any 
assistance of that kind, I had to keep my eye on both sides 
of the Channel, which I crossed almost every day for 
about a fortnight. Latham was vague about the pos¬ 
sibilities of his start. ^ He might go any morning at dawn. 
But morning after morning passed, and the French de¬ 
stroyers which had been lent by the French government 
to patrol the Channel, in case he fell in again, prepared to 
steam away. Several correspondents—English and 
French—used to spend the night on a Calais tugboat 
lying off Sangatte, and I joined them there the night 
before Latham assured us all that he would go next day. 
Something happened at that time to Latham—I think his 
nerve gave way temporarily, owing to the strain of wait¬ 
ing and continued engine trouble. He went about looking 
depressed and wretched, and he was as white as a sheet 
after an interview with the commander of a French 

176 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

destroyer, who informed him that he could wait no 
longer. 

I crossed over to Dover, deciding that the English side 
might be the best place to wait, after all, especially as 
nobody seemed likely to cross. That very morning 
Bleriot came over in his aeroplane like a bird, and there 
was not a soul to see him come. The Daily Mail staff 
were in bed and asleep, and I and other men of other 
papers were, by a lucky fluke, first on the scene to greet 
the man who had done the worst thing that has ever 
been done to England—though we did not guess it at the 
time. For, by flying across the Channel, he robbed us for 
all time of our island security and made that “silver 
streak,’’ which has been our safeguard from foreign foes, 
no more than a puddle which might be crossed in a few 
minutes along the highway of the air. After Bleriot 
came the bombing Gothas of the German army, and now, 
without air defense, we lie open to any enemy as an easy 
target for his bombs and poison gas. 

It was in the war that I completed my studies of 
aviation and its conquest. On mornings of great 
slaughter, scores of times, hundreds of times, I saw our 
boys fly out as heralds of a battle. Day after day, year 
after year, I saw that war in the air which became more 
intense, which crowded the sky with single combats and 
great tourneys, as the numbers of squadrons were in¬ 
creased by the Germans and ourselves. I saw the enemy’s 
planes and our own shot down, so that the battlefields 
were littered with their wreckage. 

In fair weather and foul they went out on reconnais¬ 
sance, signaled to the guns, fought each other to the death. 
The mere mechanical side of flight had no more secrets, 
it seemed. The little “stunts” of the pioneer days, the 
records of speed and height, were made ridiculous by the 
audacities and exploits of aviation in war. Our young 
men were masters of the machine, and flight seemed as 

177 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

natural and easy to them as to the birds who were scared 
at their swift rush of wings. They flew through storms 
of shrapnel, skimmed low above enemy trenches, dropped 
flaming death into cities and camps. The enemy was not 
behindhand in courage and skill, not less lucky in human 
target practice, rather more ruthless in bomb dropping 
over civilian populations whose women and babes were 
killed in their beds. After tax collecting by bombing 
aeroplanes in Mesopotamia, we cannot be self-righteous 
now. The beauty and the power of flight came very quickly 
to mankind after Cody went up in that old homemade ’bus, 
and crashed after a few moments of ecstasy. And man¬ 
kind has used it as a devil’s gift. 


178 


XIV 


D uring one of those periods when I deliberately 
broke the chains of regular journalism in order to 
enjoy the dangerous liberty of a free lance, I made a bid 
for fortune by writing some one-act plays, and one three- 
act play. 

I had gained some knowledge of stage technique and 
of that high mystery known as “construction,” as a 
dramatic critic, when, for six months, I acted for William 
Archer, the master critic, during his absence in the United 
States. This knowledge, I may say at once, was not of 
the slightest use to me, because technique cannot take 
the place of inspiration—Barrie and others have exploded 
its traditions—and I suffered the usual disappointments 
of the novice in that most difficult art. 

To some extent I had the wires greased for me by my 
brother, Cosmo Hamilton, and it was his influence, and 
his expert touches to my little drama “Menders of Nets,” 
which caused it to be produced at the Royalty Theater, 
with a distinguished cast, including the beautiful Beryl 
Faber and that great actor Arthur Holmes-Gore. It was 
well received, and I had visions of motor cars and other 
fruits of success, which suddenly withered when the 
announcement was made that the play was to be with¬ 
drawn after a few performances. What had happened 
was an ultimatum presented to Otho Stuart, the manager 
of the Royalty Theater, by Albert Chevalier who, in the 
same bill, was playing another one-act drama, called “The 
House.” My “Menders of Nets” played for something 
over an hour, and ended in a tragic scene in a fisherman’s 
cottage. When the curtain rang up again for Albert 

179 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Chevalier, the second play began with gloom and tragedy 
in the same key as mine, and the audience had had enough 
of this kind of atmosphere. “Either ‘Menders of Nets’ 
must be changed,” said Chevalier, “or I withdraw ‘The 
House.’ ” That, anyhow, was the explanation given to 
me, and off came my piece. 

This blow was followed by another, more amazing. 
Three other one-act plays of mine were accepted by a 
gentleman reputed to be enormously rich, who took one 
of the London theaters for a “triple bill” season. Un¬ 
fortunately, before the production of my little plays, he 
was overwhelmed in debt, abandoned his theatrical 
schemes, and departed for the Continent with the only 
copies of my three efforts, Vhich I have not seen or heard 
of from that day to this. 

Drama seemed to me too hazardous an adventure for 
a man who has to pay the current expenses of life, and 
I turned to other forms of writing to keep the little old 
pot boiling on the domestic hearth. I became for a time 
a literary “ghost.” 

It is ironical and amusing that three books of mine 
which achieved considerable financial success and obtained 
great and favorable publicity were published under an¬ 
other man’s name. He wanted kudos, and I wanted a 
certain amount of ready cash, in order to pay the rent 
and other necessities of life. I agreed readily to write a 
book for him—and afterward two more—for a certain 
fixed sum. As it happened, I think he not only obtained 
the kudos, but a fair profit as well. As I had been well 
paid, I was perfectly content. 

Some friends of mine, to whom I have mentioned this 
secret, without giving away the name of the man who 
assumed the title of author, charge me with having been 
guilty of an immoral and scandalous transaction. My 
conscience does not prick me very sharply. As far as I 
was concerned, I was guilty of no deceit, and no dishonesty. 

i8o 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I provided a certain amount of work, for which I was 
adequately paid, on condition that my name was not 
attached to it. Journalists do the same thing day by day, 
and the editor of the journal gets the credit. It is the 
other man who must have felt uneasy and conscience- 
stricken, sometimes, because he was a masquerader. But 
his sense of humor, his charm of personality, and his 
generosity, made me take a lenient view of his literary 
camouflage. 

I wrote another book, for another man, but In that 
case he was far more entitled to the credit, because it was 
actually his narrative, and the record of his own amazing 
adventures told to me, partly In French and partly in 
broken English. This was a story of the sea, called 
Fifteen Thousand Miles in a Ketch, by Captain Ray¬ 
mond Rallier du Baty, published In England by Nelson’s. 

This young Frenchman is one of the most charming 
and courageous souls I have ever met, and I look back 
with pleasure to the days when we used to motor out to 
Windsor Forest and there, under the old oaks, he used 
to spread out his charts and describe his amazing voyage 
In a little fishing ketch, with his brother and a crew of six, 
from Boulogne-sur-mer to Sidney, in Australia, stopping 
six months on the way at the desert island of Kerguelen 
In the South Pacific, where they lived like primitive men 
of the Paleolithic age, fighting sea Hons with clubs, to 
obtain their blubbers, and having strange and desper¬ 
ate adventures in their exploration of this mountainous 
island. The narrative I wrote from his spoken story 
was widely and enthusiastically reviewed, and I remember 
The Spectator went so far as to say that “it was worthy 
to have a place on the bookshelf by the side of Robinson 
Crusoe.” 

Raymond du Baty, that handsome, brown-eyed, quiet, 
and noble young seaman of France, felt the call of the 
wild again after my acquaintance with him, and returned 

i8i 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

to the desert island for further exploration. After six 
months of solitude cut off from all the world and its news, 
a steamer came to the island and brought with it tidings 
of a world gone mad. It was Armageddon. Germany 
and Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria were at war with 
France, Great Britain, and Russia. Other nations were 
getting dragged in. The fields of Europe were drenched 
in the blood of the world’s youth. France was sorely 
stricken, but holding out with heroic endurance. . . . 

Imagine the effect of that news on a young Frenchman 
who had heard no whisper of it, until its horror burst 
with full force upon him in his island of eternal peace I 
He abandoned Kerguelen and went back to France. 
Within a fortnight he had gained his pilot’s certificate 
• as an aviator, and was flying over the German lines with 
shrapnel bursting about his wings. 

That, however, is later history, and takes me away 
from that second period of free lancing in London when 
I did many different kinds of work, and, on the whole, 
enjoyed the game. 

One little enterprise at this time which interested me 
a good deal and enabled me to earn a considerable sum 
of money with hardly any labor—a rare achievement I— 
was an idea which I proposed to The Daily Graphic — 
for their correspondence column. My suggestion was to 
obtain from well-known people their views and ideals on 
the subject of “The, Simple Life.” A further part of 
my amiable suggestion was that I should be paid a certain 
fee for every column of the kind which I obtained for the 
paper. The proposal was accepted, and my wife and I 
made a careful selection of names, including princes, 
and princesses, dukes and duchesses, famous actors and 
actresses, society beauties, and, indeed, celebrities of all 
kinds. I then drafted a letter in which I suggested, in all 
sincerity, that our modern civilization had become too 
complex and too materialistic, and expressed the hope 

182 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

that I might be favored with an opinion on the possibility 
and advantages of a return to “The Simple Life.” 

The response to these letters was amazing. Instinc¬ 
tively I had struck a little note which caused a lively 
vibration of emotion and sympathy in many minds. It 
was before the war or the shadow of war had fallen over 
Europe, and when great numbers of people were alarmed 
by the lack of idealism, the gross materialism, the frivol¬ 
ity, the decadence of our social state. There was also a 
revolt of the spirit against the artificiality of city life, a 
yearning for that “return to nature” which was so strong 
a sentiment in France before the Revolution, especially 
among the aristocratic and intellectual classes. 

Something of the sort was acting like yeast in the 
imagination of similar classes in England and other 
countries. I received an immense number of answers to 
my inquiry, and many of them were extremely interesting 
and valuable as the revelation of that craving for sim¬ 
plicity in ideals and conduct of life, and for a closer touch 
with primitive nature and the beauty of eternal things. 
It was characteristic, I think, that people of high rank 
and easy circumstances were the warmest advocates of 
“The Simple Life.” The correspondence continued for 
weeks and months, and my title became a catchword on 
the stage, in Punchy and in private society. One of the 
most beautiful letters I received—it contained more than 
three thousand words—was from “Carmen Sylva,” de¬ 
scribing a day in her life as Queen of Roumania. After¬ 
ward a selection of the letters was published in book form, 
and had a great success. 

Another task I undertook more for love than lucre 
(I received only a nominal fee) was to help in the organ¬ 
ization of the Shakespeare Memorial Committee. A 
considerable sum of money had been bequeathed by cer¬ 
tain philanthropists for the purpose of honoring the 
memory of Shakespeare and encouraging the study of his 

183 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

works, by some national memorial worthy of his genius, 
as the world’s tribute to his immortal spirit. The hon¬ 
orary secretary and most ardent promoter of this scheme 
was Israel Gollancz—since knighted—a little professor at 
Oxford and London, with an immense range of scholar¬ 
ship in Anglo-Saxon and mediaeval literature, and an 
insatiable capacity for organizing committees, societies, 
academies, and other groups devoted to the advancement 
of learning, and, anyhow, to agreeable social intercourse 
and intellectual rendezvous. Meeting the professor in a 
bun shop, I became enthusiastic with the idea of the 
Shakespeare Memorial, and willingly offered to help him 
get his first General Committee and organize a great 
public meeting at the Mansion House, to place the idea 
of the Memorial before the nation with an appeal for 
funds. 

This work brought me into touch with many interesting 
people, apart from Sir Israel himself, for whom I have 
always had an affectionate regard, and among them I 
remember one of the grand old men of England—Doctor 
Furnivall, editor of the Leopold Shakespeare. He was 
over eighty years of age when I first met him, but he had 
the heart of a boy, the gayety of D’Artagnan, the Muske¬ 
teer, and the debonnair look of an ancient cavalier. 
Every Sunday he used, even at that age, to take out an 
eight of shopgirls on old Father Thames, and once every 
week he held a reception at the top of a tea shop in 
Oxford Street, when scholars old and young, journalists, 
and pretty ladies used to crowd round him, enamored by 
his silvery grace, his exquisite courtesy, the wit that played 
about his words like the mellow sunshine of an autumn 
day. He was always very kind to me, and I loved the 
sight of him. 

I came to know another grand old man—of another 
type—in connection with that work for the Shakespeare 
Committee. The first time I met Lord Roberts, that little 

184 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

white falcon of England, whom often I had seen riding 
in royal processions through the streets of London, with 
a roar of cheers following him, was in his house in Port¬ 
land Place when I “touched” him for a donation to the 
Shakespeare Fund and persuaded him to join the General 
Committee. He was going to a reception that evening, 
and I remember him now, as he stood before me, a little 
old soldier, in full uniform, with rows and rows of medals 
and stars, all a-glitter, but not brighter than his keen 
eyes beneath their shaggy brows. After listening to my 
explanation, he spoke of his love of Shakespeare as a 
man might speak of his best comrade, and declared his 
willingness to do any service for his sake. 

' The next time I saw Lord Roberts was at one of those 
early aviation meetings which I have described. I stood 
by his side, and he chatted to me about the marvel of this 
coming conquest of the air. As he spoke an aeroplane 
danced over the turf and rose and soared away, and the 
little old man, cheering like a schoolboy, ran after it a 
little way with the rest of the crowd, as young in spirit 
as any man there, sixty years his junior. 

Toward the end of his life a shadow darkened his 
spirit, though it did not dim his eyes or the fire that still 
burnt in him, as when, half a century before, he blew up 
the gates of Delhi and brought relief to the beleaguered 
survivors. He saw very clearly the approach of the 
German menace to Europe and that war in which we 
should be involved, unprepared, without a national army, 
with untrained men. Again and again he tried to warn 
the nation of its impending peril, of the tremendous forces 
preparing the destruction of its youth, and he devoted the 
last years of his life in another attempt to induce Great 
Britain to adopt some form of compulsory military serv¬ 
ice, without avail. 

I remember traveling down to his house at Ascot on 
the morning following one of those speeches in the House 

185 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

of Lords. I went to ask him to write some reminiscences 
for a weekly paper. He would not listen to that, and 
when we sat together in a first-class carriage on the way 
to town (I had a third-class ticket!) he buried himself 
behind The Times^ and was disinclined to talk. But I 
was inclined to talk, because it is not often that I should 
sit alone with “Our Bobs,” and when I caught his eye over 
the top of The Times, I ventured a remark which I 
thought might please him. 

“Powerful speech of yours, sir, last night!” 

He put down The Times, and stared at me, moodily. 

“Do you think so? Shall I tell you what the British 
people think of me?” 

“What is that, sir?” 

“They think I’m a damned old fool, scare mongering 
and raising silly bogies. That’s what they think of my 
speech.” 

And it was true, and to some extent I agreed with 
them, as I must confess, not believing much in the Ger¬ 
man menace, and believing anyhow that by wise diplo¬ 
macy, a little tact, friendly demonstrations to a friendly 
folk, we might disarm the power of the military caste 
and insure peace. 

“All the same,” said Lord Roberts, “I talk of what I 
know. Germany is preparing for- war—and we have no 
army such as we shall need when it happens.” 

It was to my brother, Cosmo* Hamilton, then editor of 
The World in London, that Lord Roberts detailed his 
scheme of military service. A series of articles, published 
anonymously in that paper, attracted considerable inter¬ 
est among the small crowd who believed in a big army of 
defense, but no one knew that every word of them was 
dictated by Lord Roberts to my brother, as his last mes¬ 
sage to the nation—before the storm broke. 

It was fitting that the little old soldier whose life cov¬ 
ered a great span of our imperial history in so many wars, 

i86 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

which now some of us look back to without much pride 
except in the ceaseless courage and the gay adventurous 
spirit of our officers and men, should die, if not on the 
field of battle, then at least at General Headquarters 
within sound of the guns. He had been a prophet of 
this war. Perhaps if we had believed him more, and if 
our statesmen and people had realized the frightful men¬ 
ace ahead, it might never have happened. But those “ifs” 
belong to the irrevocable tragedy of history. 

I was a war correspondent in France when he died, but 
I came back to England to- attend his funeral and write 
my tribute to-this great and gallant old man who, in spite 
of a life of war, or because of it, had a great tenderness 
in his heart for humanity, a love of peace, and the chivalry 
which belonged, at least in ideal, to the old code of 
knighthood. 

Going back to the subject of the Shakespeare Memorial 
Theaterj it is amusing to me to remember an interview I 
had which, at the time, was rather painful. We were 
anxious to obtain the support of Alverstone, the Lord 
Chief Justice, on the General Committee, and I drove up 
in a hansom to his house in Kensington, to put the request 
before him. 

I wore that day a “topper” and a tail coat, and looked 
so-extremely respectable that I impressed the critical eyes 
of his lordship’s footman. He explained that Lord 
Alverstone had been away on circuit but was due back 
very shortly that afternoon. Perhaps I might like to 
wait for him. I agreed, and was shown into the Lord 
Chief’s study, where I waited for something like an 
hour. 

During that time I became aware that if I were of a 
curious and dishonorable mind, I might learn many 
strange secrets in this room. Bundles of letters and 
documents were lying on the Lord Chief’s desk. The 
drawers were unlocked, as I could see by papers revealed 

187 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

in them. A “crook” in this room might get hold of the 
seals, the writing paper, the signature, and the private 
correspondence of the Lord Chief Justice of England, 
and play a great game with them. It seemed to me 
extraordinary that a footman should put an unknown 
visitor, on unknown business, into this private room, and 
leave him there for nearly an hour. 

The Lord Chief thought so, too. Just as I was becom¬ 
ing uneasy at my position to the point of ringing the bell 
and going away, there was a bang at the front door, 
followed by heavy footsteps in the hall. Then I heard a 
deep and angry voice say, “Who is he?” A moment later 
the door of the study was flung open and the great and 
rather terrifying figure of Lord Alverstone strode in. He 
stared at me as though about to sentence me to death, and 
I blenched under his gaze. 

“Who the devil are you?” he asked, with a growl of 
rage and suspicion. “What the devil do you mean by 
taking possession of my study?” 

“Why did your footman show me in, and what do you 
mean by speaking to me like that?” I answered, suddenly 
angered by his extraordinary discourtesy. 

It was not a good introduction to the subject of Shake¬ 
speare. Nor was it a respectful way of address to the 
Lord Chief Justice of England. But my reply seemed to 
reassure him as to my respectability. He breathed heavily 
for a moment, and then, in a mild voice, requested to 
know my business. When I told him I wished to enlist 
his aid on the Committee of the Shakespeare Memorial, 
a twinkle of humor came into his eyes, and he asked me 
to sit down and have a cigar while we chatted over the 
subject. He agreed to give his name and a subscription. 
Before I left, he made a half apology for his burst of 
anger at the sight of me. 

“There are lots of papers about this room. ... I 
have to be careful.” 


i88 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Then he put his heavy hand in a friendly way on my 
shoulder and said, “Glad you came.” 

I was jolly glad to go, but I thought in case of any 
accident that might happen to me later it would be useful 
to have the favor of the Lord Chief. I thought so when 
I saw him sitting below the sword of justice, in all his 
terrible power. 

From the little flat in Overstrand Mansions my wife 
and I and a small boy aged four sent out thousands of 
invitations on behalf of the committee which included his 
name, to a general public meeting at the Mansion House. 
The small boy trundled those bundles of letters in his 
wheelbarrow to the pillar box and insisted upon being 
lifted up to thrust them into the red mouth of that recep¬ 
tacle. We stuffed it full, to the great annoyance, I 
imagine, of the postman. 

The public meeting was a splendid success. Israel Gol- 
lancz was happy, Beerbohm Tree was brilliant. Anthony 
Hope made one of his charming speeches. Bernard Shaw 
was surprisingly kind to Shakespeare. There were col¬ 
umns about it in the newspapers. But though many years 
have passed, the Shakespeare Memorial is still in the air, 
the Committee is still quarreling with one another as to 
the best way of using their funds, and Sir Israel Gollancz 
is still honorary secretary, trying in his genial way to 
compromise between a hundred conflicting plans. 


189 


XV 


I N September of 1912 war broke out in the Balkans 
and, though we knew it not at the time, it was the 
overture to another war in which the whole world would 
be involved. 

This seemed to be no more than a gathering of semi- 
civilized peoples—Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro 
—joined together in military alliance and by an old heri¬ 
tage of hatred against the Turk in Europe. Behind that 
combination, however, there were Great Powers, watch¬ 
ing this affair with jealous hostility, with brooding 
anxiety, and with racial, dynastic, and financial interests 
closely touched. Russia was behind Serbia, whose hatred 
of Austria was equaled only by its fear that Austria might 
attack it in the rear when it marched against the Turks. 
Germany was behind the Turks, afraid of a Russian 
intervention. Serbia’s claim for “an open window,” on 
the Adriatic would not be tolerated by the Austrian Em¬ 
pire. The Greek claim to Crete and the dream of get¬ 
ting back to Asia Minor would arouse the jealousy of 
France and Italy. There was in this Balkan business a 
devil’s brew to poison the system of international rela¬ 
tions, and behind the scenes corrupt interests of arma¬ 
ment firms, Jewish money lenders, international financiers, 
were working in secret, sinister ways for great stakes. 

Before war was actually declared, I set out for Serbia, 
on the way to Bulgaria, as “artist correspondent” of The 
Graphic and Daily Graphic^ a title that amused me a 
good deal, as my artistic talent was of a most elementary 
kind. All I was required to do, however, was to provide 
the roughest sketches to be worked up by artists at home. 

IQO 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I was excited by this chance of becoming a war corre¬ 
spondent, which seemed to me the crown of journalistic 
ambition, and the heart of its adventure and romance. 
I little knew then that my squalid experience in this 
Balkan campaign would be but the first faint whiff of 
war with which, two years later, like most other men of 
my age, I was to become familiar in its daily routine, in 
the midst of its monstrous melodrama. 

Provided with enough notebooks and sketchbooks to 
write and illustrate a history of the world, and enriched 
with a belt of gold which weighed heavy and chafed my 
waistline, I had an uneventful journey as far as the 
Danube below Belgrade. Then it brightened up a little. 
After my passports had been examined by a fat Serbian 
officer in a highly decorated uniform, my baggage was 
pounced on by a band of hairy brigands who, without pay¬ 
ing the slightest attention to me, proceeded to fight among 
themselves for my bags. They shouted and cursed each 
other, exchanging lusty blows, and it was full twenty 
minutes before the victors piled my baggage into a miser¬ 
able cab drawn by two starved horses, and allowed me 
to go, after heavy payment. My driver whipped up his 
bags of bones and started off on a wild career over the 
roads of Belgrade, that is to say, over rock-strewn quag¬ 
mires and gaping pits. The carriage lurched from one 
side to another, with its wheels deep in the ruts, or high 
on piles of stones, and at times seemed to me that only a 
miracle could save me from instant death. 

The city of Belgrade, perched high above the Danube, 
with old, narrow, filthy streets within its walls, was filled 
with crowds of peasants mobilized for the war which had 
not yet been declared. Many of them had come from 
remote villages, and looked as if they had come from the 
Middle Ages. Some wore sheepskin coats with the 
shaggy wool inside and the skin decorated with crude 
paintings or garish embroideries. Others had woolen 

191 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

vests and a loose undergarment reaching like a kilt to 
their knees. Nearly all of them wore loose gaiters, 
worked with red stitches, or white woolen buskins. 
Others wore flat, oval sandals, almost as big as a ten¬ 
nis racquet, or shoes turned up at the toes with sharp 
peaks. 

A wild cavalcade came riding down from the hills, like 
the hordes of Ghengis Khan. Their black hair was long 
and matted, beneath sheepskin caps or broad-brimmed 
hats. Pistols bristled in their red sashes, and they stood 
up, yelling, above saddles made of fagots tied to a piece 
of skin, cracking long whips, and urging on hairy little 
horses with rope reins and stirrups. 

I had not been in Belgrade more than a few hours when 
I was arrested as an Austrian spy. Anxious to begin 
work as an “artist correspondent,” I made a rough sketch 
of a crowd of reservists waiting to entrain. Suddenly 
two soldiers fell upon me, took me prisoner, and hauled 
me through the streets, followed by a yelling crowd. 
Speaking only Serbian, they paid no heed to my protests 
in English, French, and German. In the police head¬ 
quarters, I had the same difficulty with the commandant, 
who had one language and perfect conviction that I was 
an Austrian and a spy. After a weary time, when I 
thought of a white wall and a firing party, an interpreter 
appeared and listened to my efforts at explanation in bad 
German. The sketch was what alarmed them, as well it 
might have done, if they had any artistic sense. Finally, 
I was allowed to go, after a close investigation of my 
papers. 

That night news came that the Montenegrins had fired 
the first shots in a war that was now certain, though still 
undeclared, and the streets were thronged with crowds 
drunk with emotion. I went to a cafe filled with Serbian 
officers, most of whom were amateur soldiers who had 
been professors, lawyers, doctors, and business men in 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

civil life. They drank Innumerable toasts, shouted and 
cheered, even wept a little. 

At my table one, who spoke English, raised his glass 
and said, “Here’s to our first meal In Constantinople!” 
Later, having drunk much wine, he confided to me in a 
whisper, that he was deeply anxious. No one knew the 
power of the Turk, and he added gloomily, “War Is an 
uncertain thing.” 

There was an Immense rally of correspondents, pho¬ 
tographers, and cinema men In Belgrade, all desperate to 
get to the front with the Serbians, or the Bulgarians, or 
the Greeks. Some of the “old guard” were there, like 
Frederic Villlers, Henry Nevinson, and Bennett Burleigh, 
who had been in many campaigns before I was born. 
Frederic Villlers had a wonderful kit, with a glorious 
leather coat, and looked a romantic old figure. His 
pencil, his pocket knife, his compass, were fastened to his 
waist belt by steel chains. He still played the part of the 
war correspondent familiar in romantic melodrama. 
Among the younger crowd was Percival Phillips, after¬ 
ward my comrade from first to last In a greater and longer 
war. It was then that I first become acquainted with his 
rapid way on a typewriter, on which he rattled out words 
like bursts of machine-gun fire. 

After waiting about Belgrade for some days, I left 
Serbia and traveled to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, 
where I hoped to be attached to the Bulgarian army. It 
was a horrible experience. Before the train started there 
was a wild stampede by a battalion of reservists and 
Bulgarian peasants. I narrowly escaped getting jabbed 
by long bayonets, as the men scrambled on to the train, 
storming the doorways and clambering on to the roof. 
When at last I got on board, I found myself wedged 
In the corridor between piles of baggage, peasants, and 
soldiers. I had only a piece of cheese and a little drop 
of brandy, and I cursed myself for my folly when I found 

193 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

that the journey was likely to take two days. We stopped 
at every wayside station, and were then turned out at 
night on the platform at Sarabrot, hungry, chilled to the 
bone, with a biting wind and hard frost, and without a 
place in which to lay our heads. 

Here we waited all night till dawn, and the one room 
in which there was shelter from the wind was crowded 
to suffocation by peasants lying asleep on their bundles, 
and was filled with a foul, sickening heat. One fantastic 
figure stood among the Serbians with their peaked caps, 
leather coats, and baggy white breeches. He wore a 
frock coat and tall hat, and looked as though he had just 
stepped out of the Rue de Rivoli. He was a French 
journalist on his way to the front! 

Outside the station door there was, all night long, the 
tramp of soldiers, as battalion after battalion of Serbian 
troops marched up to entrain for the front. Officers 
moved up and down the ranks with lanterns which threw 
pallid rays of light upon these gray-clad men. Presently 
a long troop train came into Sarabrot, and the soldiers 
were packed into open trucks, so tightly that they could 
not move. Their bayonets made a quickset hedge above 
each truck. They were utterly silent. There was no 
laughing or singing now. These young peasants were 
like cattle being carried to the slaughterhouses. 

It was a night of queer conversations for me. One 
man slouched up in the dim light, and said, “I guess 
you’re an Englishman, anyhow?” I returned the com¬ 
pliment, saying, “You’re an American, of course?” But 
I was wrong. He was a Bulgarian who had been in 
America for a few years and had now come back, in 
a thin flannel suit, and a straw hat, from a township 
in the Western states. 

“I heard the call,” he told me, “and I’m ready to 
take my place in the firing line. I’ll be glad to give 
hell to the Turks.” 


194 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I was as dirty as a Bulgarian peasant, and exhausted 
with hunger, when at last I reached Sofia. 

Still war had not been declared, but its spirit reigned 
in Sofia. Outside the old white mosque, with its tall 
and slender minaret—the one thing of beauty which 
had been inherited from the Turks—there passed all 
day long companies of soldiers, heavily laden in their 
field kit, and bands of Macedonian volunteers. Through 
the streets there was the rumble of bullock wagons 
and forage carts, drawn by buffaloes. On the plain of 
Slivnitza, the old battle ground between the Bulgars 
and Serbians, there were great camps of the Mace¬ 
donians who drilled all day long, and at intervals shouted 
strange war cries, and flung up their fur caps, while, 
from primitive bagpipes, there came a squealing as though 
a herd of pigs were being killed. In the ranks stood 
many young girls, dressed in the rough sheepskin jackets 
and white woolen trousers of their men folk, and serving 
as soldiers. Bullocks and buffaloes roamed in the out¬ 
skirts of their camps, and when darkness crept down the 
distant mountains the light of camp fires turned a lurid 
glare upon the scene. 

One night in Sofia a few of us heard that the Turkish 
Ambassador had handed in his papers, and driven to the 
station, where a train was waiting for him. That meant 
war. A few hours later King Ferdinand signed a mani¬ 
festo, proclaiming it to his people, and then delayed its 
publication for twenty-four hours while he stole away 
from his capital, leaving his flag flying above the palace, 
to his headquarters at Stara Zagora. It was as though 
he was frightened of his people. 

He need not have been. Those Bulgarian folk, whose 
sons and brothers were already on their way to the front, 
behaved as all people do when the spell of war first comes 
to them, before its disillusion and its horror. They 
greeted it as joyful tidings. The great bell of the cathe- 

195 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

dral boomed out above the peals of innumerable bells with 
vaguely clashing notes. That morning in the cathedral, 
a Te Deum was sung before Queen Eleanor and all the 
Ministers of State. It was market day, and thousands 
of women had come in from the country districts, with 
market produce and great milk cans slung across their * 
shoulders on big poles, glistening like quicksilver in the 
brilliant sunlight. In their white headdresses, short em¬ 
broidered kirtles, and lace petticoats, they made a pretty 
picture as they pressed toward the great cathedral. The 
square was filled with Macedonian peasants, in their 
sheepskins and white woolen trousers, standing bare¬ 
headed and reverent before the cathedral doors. There 
were remarkable faces among them, belonging to young 
men with long flaxen hair, parted in the middle and wav¬ 
ing on each side, like pictures of John the Baptist. Others 
were old, old fellows, with brown, rugged faces, white 
beards, and bent backs, who, in their ragged skins and 
fur caps, looked like a gathering of Rip van Winkles 
down from the mountains. . . . 

After exasperating delays, the correspondents of all 
countries—a wild horde—who had come to describe this 
war, as though its bloody melodrama had been staged as 
a spectacle for a dull world, were allowed to proceed to 
Stara Zagora, where King Ferdinand had established his 
headquarters. A special train was provided for this 
amazing crowd, accompanied by the military attaches, 
and a large number of Bulgarian staff officers. The jour¬ 
ney was uneventful, except for a strange sign in the 
heavens, which seemed a portent of ill omen for the 
Bulgarians. As nightcame over the Rhodope Mountains, 
there rose a crescent moon with one bright star in the 
curve of its scimitar. It was the Turkish emblem, and 
the Bulgarian officers, who had been chatting gayly in 
the corridor, became silent and moody. 

In the town of Stara Zagora, which my humorous 

196 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

friend Ludovic Nodeau called Invariably Cascara Sa- 
grada, I came in touch for the first time with the spirit 
of the Near East. It was Oriental in its architecture, in 
Its dirt, in its smell, and In Its human types. Turkish 
minarets rose above the huddle of houses. Turkish 
houses, with their lattice casements and ironwork grilles, 
high up In whitewashed walls, were among the Bulgarian 
hovels, shops, and churches. Mohammedan women, 
closely veiled, came into the market place, and young 
Turks and old squatted round the fountains, sat cross- 
legged inside their wooden booths, and smoked their 
narghile in dirty little cafes. 

A strange people from the farther East dwelt in a 
village of their own outside the town—a village of houses 
so low that I was a head taller than their roofs when I 
walked down its streets, like Gulliver in Lllllput. Their 
doorways were like the holes of dog kennels and the 
inhabitants crawled In and out on their hands and knees. 
It was a gypsy village, swarming with wild-looking men— 
black-haired, sunburned’ to the color of terra cotta, won¬ 
derfully handsome—and with women and young girls 
clad in tattered gowns of gaudy color, with bare arms 
and legs, and the breast revealed. Children, stark naked, 
played among heaps of filth, and savage dogs leaped at 
every stranger, as they did when I went with two friends 
inside the village. A tall girl, beautiful as an Eastern 
hourI,*beat back the dogs and led us to the king of this 
Romany tribe, an old, old villain who made signs for 
money and was not satisfied with what I gave him. Pres¬ 
ently he called to some women, and they brought out a 
girl of some fifteen years, like a little wild animal, with 
the grace and beauty of a woodland thing. She was for 
sale*, and I could have bought her and taken her as my 
slave, for five French francs. I was tempted to do so, 
but did not quite know how I should get her back to my 
little housre in Holland Street, Kensington, as a Christmas 

197 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

present to my wife. Also, I was not certain whether my 
wife would like to adopt her. I declined the offer, there¬ 
fore, but gave the old man the five francs as a sign of 
friendship—and as a bribe of safety. 

We were surrounded, now, by a crowd of tall young 
Gypsies with long sticks, and I did not like the way they 
eyed us. Luckily, a Bulgarian police officer rode through 
the village, and at the sight of him, the Gypsies’ scuttled 
like rabbits in their holes. We kept close to his saddle 
until we were beyond the village, and by expressive ges¬ 
ticulation the man made us understand that, in his judg¬ 
ment, the place behind us was not a safe spot for Christian- 
gentlemen. 

One little trouble of mine, and of friends of mine, in 
Stara Zagora, was the question of food. There was one 
pretty good restaurant, set apart for the military attaches 
and high staff officers, but after they had dined well, while 
we hung around, sniffing their fat meats, there was noth¬ 
ing left for us. We were reduced to eating in a filthy little 
place, where the food was vile, and the chief method 
of washing plates was by the tongues of the hungry serv¬ 
ing wenches, as I saw, through the kitchen door. Our 
billeting arrangements, also, left much to be desired, and 
with two inseparable companions, Horace- Grant, of the 
Daily Mirror, and a young Italian photographer named 
Console, I slept in a pestilential house, so utterly foul 
that I dare not describe it. One little additional discom¬ 
fort, to me, was the merry gamboling of a tribe of mice, 
who played hide and seek over my body as I lay in a 
coffinlike bed, and cleaned their whiskers on the window 
sill. 

We were heartily glad to move forward from General 
Headquarters to the Turkish village of Mustapha Pasha, 
on the river Maritza, which had just been captured by the 
Bulgarians on their way to the siege of Adrianople. 

My most dominant memory of this village, which was 

198 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the headquarters of the Bulgarian Second Army, may be 
summed up in the two words, mud and oxen. The “roads” 
were just quagmires, in which endless teams of oxen, with 
some buffaloes, dragging interminable batteries of heavy 
guns, ammunition- wagons, and forage, wallowed deep. 
Stones, piled loosely, about a foot broad, at the edge of 
the track, made- the only dry foothold for those who 
walked. But the Bulgarian* army trudged through the 
slime, battalion after battalion, with flowers on their 
rifles, led forward by priests, dancing and waving their 
arms in an ecstasy of war fever, inspired by hatred of the 
Turk. The oxen- snarled and snuffled, and constantly I 
had to avoid being tramped down by holding on to their 
curly horns or thrusting myself away from their wet 
nozzles. Strange groups of volunteers followed the army 
—family groups, with old grandfathers and grand¬ 
mothers and grandma-aunties, with uncles and cousins and 
brothers, laden with tin pots and bundles, and armed 
with old sporting guns and country knives, and any kind 
of weapon useful for carving up a Turk. 

One night, when the guns were furious round Adriano- 
ple, and the sky was lurid with bursting shells, I saw a 
division of Serbian cavalry pass through Mustapha Pasha. 
They had traveled far, and every man was asleep on his 
horse, which plodded on in the track of an old peasant 
with a lantern. I shall never forget the sight of those 
sleeping riders in the night. 

Horace Grant, Console, and I were billeted in a farm¬ 
house a mile or so outside Mustapha Pasha, kept by a 
tall, bearded Bulgarian peasant with his wife and mother, 
and three dirty little children. We slept on divans-, as 
hard as boards, and fed on gristly old chickens killed 
beyond the doorposts. The family regarded us as though 
we had come from a far planet—mysterious beings, of 
incomprehensible ways—and our ablutions in the morn¬ 
ings, when we stripped to the waist and washed in a pail, 

199 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

filled them with deep wonderment. It was our. local 
reputation as “The men who wash their bodies” which 
liberated us from military arrest. 

On the way to Mustapha Pasha and back again to our 
farmhouse, we had to pass a cemetery which was used as 
a camp. It was never a pleasant journey at night, because 
we stumbled over loose boulders, fell into three feet of 
mud, and were attacked by packs of wolflike dogs whose 
fierce eyes shone through the darkness. One night I felt 
a prick in the shoulder, and found I had run up against 
the sword of a Bulgarian officer who was feeling his way 
along the wall in pitch darkness. But it was when the 
Bulgarians were suddenly replaced by Serbians that we 
were challenged by a sentry and arrested by the guard, 
which rushed out at the sound of his shots. They could 
make nothing of us, and suspected the worst, until some 
peasants in the neighborhood came up and identified us as 
three men strangely addicted to cold water, but under 
the protection of Bulgarian headquarters. 

Along the valley of the Maritza, on the way to Adrl- 
anople which was closely invested, the Turkish villages 
had been fired, and we saw the smoke rising above the 
flames, and then tramped through their ruins. Looting 
was strictly forbidden, under pain of death, but in one 
village old men and women were prowling about in a 
ghoullike way, and filling sacks with bits of half-burnt 
rubbish. Suddenly an old woman began to scream, and 
we saw her struggling with a Bulgarian soldier who 
threatened to run his bayonet through her body. The 
others fled, leaving their sacks behind. 

That night, in a dirty little eating house, a Hungarian 
correspondent protested to his friends against the ruth¬ 
less way in which the Bulgars had burned those Turkish 
homesteads. Upon leaving the restaurant he was ar¬ 
rested by military police and flung into a filthy jail, with 
the warning that he would rot to death there unless he 

200 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

changed his opinion about the burning of the villages, 
and agreed that the Turks had fired them on their retreat. 
He decided to change his opinion. Later, however, he 
was riding alone when he was set upon by Bulgarian 
police, who seized his horse, flung him into a ditch, and 
kicked him senseless. It was a warning against careless 
table conversation. 

We soon discovered that, instead of being treated as 
war correspondents, we were in a position more like that 
of prisoners of war. Strict orders were issued that we 
were not to go beyond a certain limit outside Mustapha 
Pasha, and the severity of the censorship was so great 
that my harmless descriptive articles about the scenes be¬ 
hind the lines, as well as my feeble sketches, were mostly 
canceled. I have to confess that I became a rebel against 
these orders, and, with my two companions, not only 
broke bounds, day after day, but smuggled through my 
articles at a risk which I now know was extremely rash. 
I hired a carriage with three scraggy horses, a chime of 
bells, and a Bulgarian giant, at enormous expense. It had 
once belonged to a Bulgarian priest, and was so imposing 
that when we drove out to the open country, toward 
Adrianople, we used to be saluted by the Bulgarian army. 

I remember driving one day to a spur of hills over¬ 
looking the city of Adrianople, from which we could see 
the six minarets of the Great Mosque, and the high ex¬ 
plosives bursting above its domes and rooms. A German 
—Doctor Bauer—and an Austrian—von Zifferer—ac¬ 
companied us, and we picnicked on the hill with an agree¬ 
able excitement at getting even this glimpse of the “real 
business.” I played a game of chess with von Zifferer, 
who carried a pocket set, and this very charming young 
Austrian accepted my lucky victory with good nature, 
and then asked a question which I always remembered: 

“How long will it be before you and I are on opposite 
sides-of a fighting line?” 


201 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

It was not very long. 

My experiences as a war correspondent in Bulgaria 
were farcical. I saw only the back wash of the bloody 
business—and I have a secret and rather wicked suspicion 
that the war correspondent of the old type did not see so 
* much as his imaginative dispatches and thrilling sketches 
suggested to the public, nor one-thousandth part as much 
as that little body of men in the World War, who had 
absolute liberty of movement, and the acknowledged right 
of going to any part of the front, at any time. In Bul¬ 
garia, all we saw of the war was its slow-moving tide of 
peasant soldiers, trudging forward dejectedly, the tangled 
traffic of guns and transport, the misery—unimaginable 
and indescribable—of the wounded and the prisoners, 
stricken with cholera, packed, like slaughtered cattle, into 
railway trucks, tossed in heaps on straw-filled ox wagons, 
jolted to death over the ruts and boulders of unmade 
roads: Horrible pictures which gave me a little appren¬ 
ticeship, but not much, for the sights of the war that was 
to come. 

One little scene comes to my mind vividly. It was at 
dawn, in a way side station. King Ferdinand had ar¬ 
rived with his staff. The fat old man with piggy eyes 
was serving out medals to heroes of the siege of Adrian- 
ople. They were all wounded heroes, some of them 
horribly mutilated, so that, without arms or legs, they 
were carried by soldiers into the presence of the King. 
Others hobbled up on crutches, white and haggard. 
Others were blind. I could not see any pleasure in their 
faces, any sense of high reward, when they listened to 
Ferdinand’s gruff speech while he fastened a bit of metal 
to their breasts. In the white mist of dawn they looked 
a ghastly little crowd of broken men. 

I have already told, in a previous chapter, how old 
Fox Ferdinand conversed with me on the bridge over the 
Maritza at Mustapha Pasha. His friendliness then did 

202 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

not allow me to escape his wrath a few days later, when 
he saw me considerably outside the area to which corre¬ 
spondents were restricted, and he sent over a staff officer 
to tell me that I should be placed under arrest unless I 
withdrew immediately. 

I was arrested, and locked up for a time, with Horace 
Grant and Console, for the crime of accompanying a col¬ 
league to the railway station at Mustapha Pasha! That 
was when S. J. Pryor, of The Times, was leaving G.H.Q. 
to go back to Sofia. Being, as I thought, the proud 
owner of a carriage and three horses, to say nothing of my 
Bulgarian giant, I offered to give him with his luggage a 
lift to the station. He accepted gladly, but at the hour 
appointed I discovered that carriage, horses, giant, and 
all had disappeared from their stables. As I found out 
later, they had been “pinched” by G.H.Q. Pryor had 
not too much time to get his train, and Grant and Console 
and I volunteered to carry some of his bags. We arrived 
in time, but were immediately confronted by a savage 
Bulgarian general, who spluttered with fury, called up 
some hairy savages with big guns, and ordered them to 
lock us up in a baggage shed. Little S. J. Pryor was 
extremely distressed at this result of our service to him, 
but he could not delay his journey. 

My friends and I were liberated from the shed after 
some hours of imprisonment, and conducted, under 
mounted escort, to Mustapha Pasha. A few nights later 
we were informed that we had been expelled from General 
Headquarters and must proceed back to filthy old “Cas- 
cara Sagrada.” I had a violent scene with the Bulgarian 
staff officer and censor who conveyed this order, and told 
him that I intended to stay where I was, unless I was 
forcibly removed by the Bulgarian army I 

He took me at my word, and that night, when Grant 
and I were finishing a filthy but comforting meal in our 
old farmhouse, far outside the village, there was a heavy 

203 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Clump at the door, followed by the entry of six hairy- 
looking ruffians with fixed bayonets. One of them re¬ 
moved his sheepskin hat and plucked from his matted 
hair a small piece of paper, which was a written order for 
our expulsion signed by the General in Command of the 
Second Army. 

I shall never forget Console at the moment of their 
arrival. Having finished his supper, he was lying asleep 
on the divan, but, suddenly awakened, sat up with all his 
hair on end, and grabbed a large loaded revolver from 
beneath his pillow. We did not allow him to indulge 
in a private massacre, but adopted a friendly demeanor 
to our guards—for we were their prisoners, all right— 
and gave them mugs of peasant wine as a token of good 
will. After a frightful scramble for our belongings, 
which were littered all over the room, we accompanied 
the hairy men to an ox wagon, where we sat in the straw, 
jolted in every limb and in every tooth, for the three 
miles back to the old station. 

On the way we passed a battalion of Serbian infantry, 
and one of the officers carried on a cheery conversation 
with me in German. When he heard that I was a 
correspondent of The Graphicy he was delighted and 
impressed. 

“Come with us I” he shouted. “We will show you some 
good fighting!” 

“I would like to,” I answered, “but I am a prisoner of 
these Bulgarians.” 

He thought I was joking, and laughed loudly. 

Guarded by our soldiers—they were really a simple 
and sturdy little crowd of good-natured peasants—we 
were taken across a railway line to a dark train. Our 
guards laughed, shook hands, pushed us gently into the 
train, and said, ^^Dohra den, GospodinF^ 

Then we had a surprise. The train was pitch dark, 
but not empty. It was filled with correspondents of all 

204 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

nationalities, who, like ourselves, had been expelled I 
They were without food or drink or light; they had been 
there for half'a day and part of a night; and they were 
furious. 

That journey was a comedy and a tragedy. The train 
moved away some time in the night, and crawled forward 
that day and night toward “Cascara Sagrada,” as Nodeau 
called that town of filth. We starved, parched with 
thirst, cramped together. But we laughed until we cried 
over the absurdity of our situation and a thousand jests. 

Marinetti, the arch Futurist, was there, and after mak¬ 
ing impassioned love to a Bulgarian lady who could not 
understand his Italian or French, he recited his great 
Futurist poem, “L’Automobile,” very softly at first, then 
with his voice rising higher, as the “automobile” gained 
speed, until it was like the bellow of a bull. In a wayside 
station, soldiers came running toward our carriage, with 
their bayonets handy, thinking some horrible atrocity was 
in progress. Marinetti was delighted with the success 
of Futurist poetry in Bulgaria! 

At Stara Zagora I found wires were being pulled in Lon¬ 
don and Sofia, on my behalf, through the means of S. J. 
Pryor, who was a loyal friend, and one of the dearest 
men in the world. (He is my “Bellamy” in The Street 
of Adventure.) In a few days. Grant, Console, and I, 
alone among the expelled crowd, received permits to re¬ 
turn to the Bulgarian headquarters, where our reappear¬ 
ance created consternation among the staff officers and 
censors, who thought they were well rid of us. 


205 


XVI 


I N 1912, to which year I have now come in these anec¬ 
dotes of journalistic life, England was not without 
troubles at home and abroad, but nothing had happened, 
or seemed likely to happen (except in the imagination of 
a few anxious and farseeing people), to touch more than 
the surface of her tranquillity, to undermine the founda¬ 
tions of her wealth, or to menace her security as a great 
imperial Power. 

It was a very pleasant place for pleasant people, if they 
had a social status above that of casual, or sweated, labor. 
The aristocracy of wealth still went through the social 
ritual of the year, in country houses and town houses, 
from the London season to Cowes, from the grouse moors 
to the Riviera, agreeably bored, and finding life, on the 
whole, a good game, unless private passion wrecked it. 

The great middle class, with its indeterminate bound¬ 
aries, was happy, well-to-do, with a comfortable sense of 
ease and security, apart from the ordinary anxieties, 
tragedies, failures, of private and domestic life. People 
with “advanced” and extraordinary views made a lot of 
noise, but it hardly broke into the hushed gardens of the 
country houses of England. Labor was getting clamor¬ 
ous, with mock heroic threats of revolution, but was no 
real menace to the forces of law and order. Women were 
beginning to put forward claims to political equality with 
men, but their extravagance of talk had not yet been 
translated into wild action. The spirit of England was, 
in the mass, rooted to its old traditions, and its social 
habits were not overshadowed by any dread. 

As a descriptive writer and professional onlooker of 

206 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

life (writing history and fiction In my spare time), I had, 
perhaps, some deeper consciousness than most people 
outside my trade, of dangers brewing In the cauldron of 
fate. I touched English life In most of Its phases, high 
and low, and was aware, vaguely, perhaps a little mor¬ 
bidly, of undercurrents beating up strongly below all this 
fair surface of tranquillity. As I shall tell later, I came 
face to face with three bogles of threatening aspect. One 
was Ireland In Insurrection. Another was Industrial con¬ 
flict in England, linked up with that Irish menace. A 
third was war with Germany. Meanwhile, I chronicled 
the small beer of English life, and described Its social 
pageantry—royal visits, the Derby, Henley, Fourth of 
June at Eton, the Eton and Harrow match. Ascot, Cowes, 
the Temple Flower Show, garden fetes, Maud Allen’s 
dancing, the opera, the theater, fancy dress balls. 

There was a new passion for “dressIng-up,” In that 
England before the war. It seemed as though youth, and 
perhaps old age, desired more color than was allowed by 
modern sumptuary laws. 

I attended a great fancy dress ball at the Albert Hall 
—one of many, but the most magnificent. All “the 
quality” was there, the most beautiful women In England, 
and the most notorious. I went, superbly, as Dick Sheri¬ 
dan, in pale blue silk, with lace ruffles, a white wig, white 
silk stockings, buckled shoes, a jeweled sword. It was 
strange how different a man I felt In those clothes. The 
vulgarity of modern life seemed to fall from me. I was 
an eighteenth-century gentleman, not only In appearance, 
but In spirit. I was my own great grandfather! 

London that night was a queer sight anywhere within 
a mile of Kensington. Sedan chairs, carried by sturdy 
porters In old liveries, conveyed little ladles In hooped 
dresses and high wigs. Columbines flitted by with 
Pierrots. Out of taxicabs and hansoms and old growlers 
came parties of troubadours, English princesses with 

' 207 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

horned headdresses, Spanish toreadors, Elizabethan buc¬ 
caneers, Stuart cavaliers. 

At the ball I saw the faces of my friends strangely 
transfigured. They, too, were their own ancestors. One 
of those I encountered that night was a fellow jour¬ 
nalist named “Rosy” Leach. He swaggered in the form 
of a Stuart gentleman, and said, “What a game is this 
life I” The next time I met him was when he wore 
another kind of fancy dress—khaki-colored—with high 
boots caked up to the tabs in the mud of the Somme 
fields. “Death is nothing,” he said, after we had talked 
a while. “It’s what goes before—the mud and the beast¬ 
liness.” He was killed in one of those battles, like many 
others of those who danced with Columbine and the 
ladies of the gracious past. 

This dressing-up phase was not restricted to London, 
or rich folks. There was a joyous epidemic of pageants, 
in which many old towns and villages of England drama¬ 
tized their own history and acted the parts of their own 
ancestors. I was an enthusiast of this idea, and still think 
that for the first time since the Middle Ages it gave 
the people of England a chance of revealing their innate 
sense of drama and color and local patriotism. In most 
of these pageants the actors made their own costumes, 
and went to old books to learn something of ancient 
fashions, heraldry, arms and armor, and the history of 
things that had happened on their own soil and in their 
own cathedrals, churches, guild houses, and ruined castles, 
whose stones are haunted with old ghosts. The children 
in these pageants made fields of living flowers. Youth was 
lovely in its masquerade. Some of the pictures made by 
the massed crowds were unforgetable, as in the Oxford 
pageant, when Charles held his court again, and in the 
St. Albans pageant, when the English archers advanced 
behind flights of whistling arrows. If one had any sense 
of the past, one could not help being stirred by the con- 

208 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

tinuity of English life, its unbroken links with ancient 
customs, its deep roots in English soil. At Bury St. 
Edmunds there was a scene depicting the homage of 
twenty-two gentlemen to Mary Tudor. Each actor there 
bore the same name and held the same soil as those who 
had actually bowed before the Tudor lady. It is why 
tradition is strong in the character of our race, and 
steadies it. 

There was a comic and pitiful side to these shows, 
mainly caused by the weather, which was pitiless, so that 
often the pageant grounds were quagmires, and ancient 
Britons, Roman soldiers, Saxon princesses, Stuart beau¬ 
ties, had to rush for shelter from rain storms which 
bedraggled them. But that was part of the game. 

London dreamed not at that time of darkened lights, 
prohibited hours for drink, the heavy hand of war upon 
the pleasures and follies of youth. Was there more folly 
than now? Perhaps vice flaunted more openly. Perhaps 
temptation spread its net with less need of caution— 
though I doubt whether there has been much change in 
morals, despite the park pouncing of policemen. There 
was more gayety in London, more lights in London 
nights, more sociability, good and bad, a great freedom 
of spirit, in those- days before the war. So it seems to 
us now. 

I was never one of the gilded youth, but sometimes I 
studied them in their haunts, not with gloomy or reprov¬ 
ing eyes, being tolerant of human nature, and glad of 
laughter. 

One wild night began when the policeman on point 
duty in Piccadilly Circus thought that the last revelers 
had gone home in the last taxis, but he was a surprised 
man when life seemed to waken up again and there was 
the swish of motor cars through the circus and bands of 
young men walking in evening dress, not, apparently, on 
their way to bed, but just beginning some new adventure. 

209 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

They advanced upon the Grafton Galleries singing a little 
ballad that marks the date: 

“Hullo, hullo, hullo! 

It’s a different girl again! 

Different hair, different clothes, 

Different eyes, different nose . . 

This affair had been kept a dead secret from press 
and public. It was a “glorious stunt” which had for 
its amiable object the introduction of all the prettiest 
girls of the theater world to all the smartest bloods 
of the universities and clubs. It was entitled the Butter¬ 
fly Ball. 

Certainly there were some astoundingly beautiful girls 
at this assembly, and not a few of them. The university 
boys were, for a time abashed by so much loveliness. 
But they brightened up, especially when the most famous 
sporting peer of England—Lord Lonsdale—led off the 
dance with a little girl dressed, rather naughtily, as a 
teetotum. By the time I left—a kind of Pierrot looking 
on at the gayety of life—there was a terrific battle in 
progress between groups of boys and girls, with little 
white rolls of bread as their ammunition. Not com¬ 
mendable. Not strictly virtuous, nor highly proper, but 
in its wildness there was the spirit of a youth which, 
afterward, was heroic in self-sacrifice. ... So things 
happened in London before the war. 

A series of articles appearing in The Daily Mail, by 
Robert Blatchford, once a Socialist and still on the demo¬ 
cratic side of political life, disturbed the sense of security 
in the average mind by a slight uneasiness. Not more 
than that, because the average mind had its inherited faith 
in our island inviolability and the power of the British 
Navy. There were articles entitled “Am Tag,” which is 
bad German, and they professed to reveal a determina- 

210 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

tion in the military and naval castes of Germany to de¬ 
stroy the British fleet, invade England, and smash the 
British Empire. 

Some of the evidence brought forward seemed childish 
in its absurdity. There were not many facts to a wealth 
of rhetoric. But they created a newspaper sensation, 
and were- pooh-poohed by the government, as we now 
know, with utter insincerity—for there were members 
of that government who knew far more than Blatch- 
ford how deep and widespread was German hostility to 
Great Britain, and* how close Europe stood to a world 
war. 

One fantastic little incident connected with those 
articles of Blatchford’s amused me considerably at the 
time, though afterward I thought of it as a strange 
prophecy. 

I called on W. T. Stead one day in his office of The 
Review of Reviews, which afterward I was to edit for 
a year. It was just before lunch time, and Stead had an 
engagement with Spender of The Westminster Gazette. 
But he grabbed me by the arm, in his genial way, and said, 
“Listen to this for a. minute, and tell me what you think 
of it.” 

It appeared that he had been rather upset by Blatch¬ 
ford’s articles. He could not make up his mind whether 
they were all nonsense or had some truth at the back of 
them. He decided to consult the spirit world through 
“Julia,” his medium. 

“We rang up old Bismarck, Von Moltke, and William 
II of Prussia. ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘Is there going to be 
war between Germany and England?’ ” 

The spirits of these distinguished Germans seemed 
uncertain. Bismarck saw a red mist approaching the 
coast of England. Von Moltke said the British fleet 
had better keep within certain degrees of latitude and 
longitude—which was kind of him! One of the trio—I 

211 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

forget which—said there would be war between Germany 
and England. It would break out suddenly, without 
warning. 

‘‘When?” asked W. T. Stead. 

A date was given. It was the month of August. The 
year was not named. 

I laughed heartily at Stead’s anecdote, especially when 
he told me the effect this announcement had upon him. 
He was so disturbed that he went round to the Admiralty, 
interviewed Lord Fisher, who was a friend of his, and 
revealed the dread message that the German fleet was 
going to attack in August. (It was then May, 1912). 

Fisher leaned back in his chair, smiled grimly, and 
said, ‘Wo such luck, my hoyl^* 

In August of that year I was engaged in trouble which 
did not seem connected with Germany, though I am 
inclined to think now that German agents were watching 
it very closely—especially one German baron who posed 
as a journalist and was always reporting on industrial 
unrest in Great Britain, wherever it happened to break 
out. I had met him at Tonypandy, in Wales, during 
the miners’ riots down there, and I met him again in 
Liverpool, which was now in the throes of a serious 
strike. 

It was the nearest thing to civil war I have seen in any 
English city. I have forgotten the origin of the strike— 
I think it began with the dockers—^but it spread until the 
whole of the transport service was at a standstill, and the 
very scavengers left their work. The Mersey was 
crowded for weeks with shipping from all the ports of 
the world, laden with merchandise, some of it perishable, 
which no hands would touch. No porters worked in the 
railway goods yards, so that trains could not be unloaded. 
There was no fresh meat, and no milk for babes. Not a 
wheel turned in Liverpool. It was like a besieged city, 
and presently, in hot weather, began to stink in a pesti- 

212 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

lential way, because of the refuse and muck left rotting 
in the streets and squares. 

This refuse, among which dead rats lay, was so filthy 
in one of the best squares of Liverpool outside the hotel 
where I was staying, that a number of journalists, and 
myself, borrowed brooms, sallied out, swept up the rub¬ 
bish heaps, and made bonfires of them, surrounded by a 
crowd of angry men who called us “scabs” and “black¬ 
legs,” and threatened to “bash” us, if we did not stop 
work. We stuck to our job, and were rewarded by a 
clapping of hands from ladies and maidservants in the 
neighboring windows, so that our broomsticks seemed as. 
heroic as the lances of chivalry. 

Some bad things happened in Liverpool. The troops 
were stoned by mobs of men who were becoming sullen 
and savage. Shops were looted. I saw no less than 
forty tramcars overturned and smashed one afternoon 
in that sunny August, because they were being driven by 
men who had refused to strike. 

On that afternoon I saw something of mob violence, 
which I should have thought incredible in England. A 
tramcar was going at a rapid pace, driven by a man who 
was in terror of his life because of a mob on each side 
of the road, threatening to stone him to death. Inside 
the car were three women and a baby. A fusillade of 
stones suddenly broke every window. Two of the women 
crouched below the window frames, and the third woman, 
with the baby, utterly terrified, came on to the platform 
outside, and prepared to jump. A stone struck her on 
the head, and she dropped the baby into the roadway, 
where it lay quite still. A gust of hoarse laughter rose 
from the mob, and not one man stirred to pick up the 
baby. Terrible, but true. It was left there until a woman 
ran out of a shop. . . . Wedged behind the men, but 
a witness of all that happened, I was conscious then 
of a cruelty lurking in the vicious elements of our great 

213 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

cities which, before, I had not believed to exist in Eng¬ 
land of the twentieth century. If ever there were 
revolution in England, it would not be made with rose 
water. 

The troops and .police were patient and splendid in 
their discipline, despite great provocation at times. Now 
and again, when the mob started looting or stone throw¬ 
ing, the police made baton charges, which scattered 
crowds of young hooligans like chaff before them, and 
they thrashed those they caught without mercy. At 
such times I had to run like a hare, for there is no dls- 
.crlmlnatlon in treatment of the Innocent. 

One afternoon the troops were ordered to- fire on a 
crowd which made an attempt to attack an escort of 
prisoners, and there was a small number of casual¬ 
ties. That night I had an exciting narrative to dictate 
over the telephone to the office of The Daily Chronicle, 
But, in the middle of it, the- sub-editor, MacKenna, 
who was taking down my message, said, “Cut it short, 
old man I Something is happening to-night more impor¬ 
tant than a strike in Liverpool. The German fleet is 
out in the North Sea, and the British fleet is cleared for 
action 

When I put down the telephone receiver, I felt a 
shiver go down my spine; and I thought of Stead’s pre¬ 
posterous story of war in August. Had it happened? 

There was nothing in next day’s papers. Some Iron 
censorship closed down on that story of the German fleet, 
true or false. ... As we now know, it was true. The 
German fleet did go out on that night in August, but 
finding the British fleet prepared, they went back again. 
It was in August of another year that Germany put all to 
the great hazard. 

The thoughts of the English people were not obsessed 
with the German menace. For the most part they knew 
nothing about it, apart from newspaper “scares,” which 

214 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

they pooh-poohed, and no member of the government, 
getting anxious now in secret conversations, took upon 
himself the duty of preparing the nation for a dreadful 
ordeal. 

England was excited by two subjects of sensational 
Interest and Increasing passion—the mania of the militant 
suffragettes, and the raising of armed forces In Ireland, 
under the leadership of Sir Edward Carson, to resist 
Home Rule. 

I saw a good deal of both those phases of political 
strife In England and Ireland. The suffragette move¬ 
ment kept me In a continual state of mental exasperation, 
owing to the excesses of the militant women on one side, 
and the stupidity and brutality of the opponents of 
women’s suffrage on the other. I became a convinced 
supporter of “Votes for Women,” partly because of theo¬ 
retical justice which denied votes to women of intellect, 
education, and noble work, while giving It to the lowest, 
most Ignorant, and most brutal ruffians in the country, 
partly because of a sporting admiration—In spite of 
Intellectual disapproval—of cultured women who went 
willingly to prison for their faith, defied the police with 
all their muscular strength, risked the brutality of angry 
mobs (which was a great risk), and all with a gay, laugh¬ 
ing courage which mocked at the arguments, anger, and 
ridicule of the average man. 

Many of the methods of the “militants” were out¬ 
rageous, and loosened, I think, some of the decent re¬ 
straints of the social code, for which we had to pay later 
In a kind of sexual wildness of modern young women. 
But they were taunted Into “direct action” by Cabinet 
Ministers, and exasperated by the deliberate falsity and 
betrayal of members of Parliament, who had pledged 
themselves at election time to support the demand of 
women for the suffrage, by constitutional methods. 

A number of times I watched the endeavors of the 

215 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

“militants” to present a petition to the Prime Minister 
or invade the Houses of Parliament. Always it was the 
same scene. The deputation would march from the 
Caxton Hall through a narrow lane in the midst of a vast 
crowd, and then be scattered in a rough and tumble 
scrimmage when mounted police rode among them. 

Often I saw a friend of mine walking by the side of 
these deputations, as a solitary bodyguard. It was H. W. 
Nevinson, the war correspondent, with his fine ruddy 
face and silvered hair, a paladin of woman suffrage as of 
all causes which took “liberty” for their watchword. The 
crowd was less patient of men sympathizers of militant 
women than with the women themselves, and Nevinson 
was roughly handled. At a great demonstration at the 
Albert Hall, he fought single-handed against a dozen 
men stewards who fell upon him, when he knocked down 
a man who had struck a woman a heavy blow. Nevinson, 
though over fifty at the time, could give a good account 
of himself, and some of those stewards had a tough time 
before they overpowered him and flung him out. 

Round the Houses of Parliament, on those nights of 
attack, there were strong bodies of police who played 
games of catch-as-catch-can with little old ladies, frail 
young women, strong-armed and lithe-limbed girls who 
tried to break through their cordon. One little old cripple 
lady used to charge the police in a wheel chair. Others 
caught hold of the policemen’s whistle chains, and would 
not let go until they were escorted to the nearest po¬ 
lice station. One night dozens of women chained and 
padlocked themselves to the railings of the House of 
Commons, and the police had to use axes to break their 
chains. 

There was a truly frightful scene, which made me 
shiver, one night, when those “militants” refused to budge 
before the mounted police and seized hold of their bridles 
and stirrup-leathers. The horses, scared out of their wits 

216 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

by these clinging creatures, reared, and fell, but nothing 
would release the grip of those determined and reckless 
ladles, though some of them were bruised and bleeding. 

The patience and good humor of the police were mar¬ 
velous, but I was sorry to see that they made class dis¬ 
tinctions in their behavior. They were certainly very 
brutal to a party of factory girls brought down from the 
North of England. I saw them driven Into a narrow 
alley behind Westminster Hospital, and the police pulled 
their hair down, wound it round their throats, and flung 
them about unmercifully. It was not good to see. 

I had several talks at the time with the two dominant 
leaders of the militant section, Mrs. Pankhurst and her 
daughter Chrlstabel, and I was present at their trial, 
when they were indicted for conspiracy to Incite a riot. 
Mrs. Pankhurst’s defense was one of the most remarkable 
speeches I have ever heard in a court of law, most elo¬ 
quent, most moving, most emotional. Even the magis¬ 
trate was moved to tears, but that did not prevent him 
from setting aside an unrepealed statute of Charles II 
(which allowed a deputation of not more than thirteen 
to present a petition, without let or hindrance, to the 
King’s ministers) and sentencing Mrs. Pankhurst and her 
daughter to two years’ imprisonment. 

I saw Christabel Pankhurst during the course of the 
trial, and she asked me whether I thought she would be 
condemned. I told her “Yes,” believing that she 
had the strength to hear the truth, and afterward, when 
she asked me how much I thought she would get, I said 
“Two years.” I had an idea from her previous record 
that she was ready for martyrdom at any cost, but to my 
surprise and dismay, she burst into tears. Her defense 
and cross-examination of witnesses were also marred by 
continual tears, so that it was painful to listen to her. 
Her spirit seemed quite broken, and she never took part 
again in any militant demonstrations, although she was 

217 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

liberated a short time after the beginning of her imprison¬ 
ment. She worked quietly at propaganda in Paris. 

One nation watched the mania of the “wild, wild 
women” with a growing belief in England’s decadence, 
as it was watching the Irish affairs, and industrial unrest. 
German agents found plenty to write home about. 


218 


XVII 


O NE day in 1913, I was asked by Robert Donald to 
call on a Canadian professor who had been engaged 
in “a statistical survey of Europe,” whatever that may 
mean, and might have some interesting information to 
give. 

When he received me, I found him a little, mild-eyed 
man, with gold-rimmed spectacles, behind which I pres¬ 
ently discovered the look of one obsessed by a knowledge 
of some terrific secret. That was after he had surprised 
me by declining to talk about statistics, and asking 
abruptly whether I was an honest young man and a good 
patriot. Upon my assuring him that I was regarded as 
respectable by my friends and was no traitor, he bade me 
shut the door and listen to something which he believed 
it to be his duty to tell, for England’s sake. 

What he told me was decidedly alarming. In pursuit 
of his “statistical survey of Europe” on behalf of the 
Canadian and American governments, he had spent two 
years or so in Germany. He had been received in a 
courteous way by German professors, civil servants, and 
government officials, at whose dinner tables he had met 
German celebrities, and high officers of the German army. 
They had talked freely before him after some time, and 
there was revealed to him, among all these people, a 
bitter, instinctive, relentless, and jealous hatred of Eng¬ 
land. They made no secret that the dominant thought 
in their souls was the necessity and inevitability of a con¬ 
flict with Great Britain, in order to destroy the nation 
which stood athwart their own destiny as their greatest 
commercial competitor, and as the one rival of their own 

219 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

sea power, upon which the future of Germany was based. 
For that conflict they were preparing the mind of their 
own people by intensive propaganda and “speeding up” 
the output of their naval and military armament. “Eng¬ 
land,” said my little informant, “is menaced by the most 
fearful struggle in history, but seems utterly ignorant of 
this peril, which is coming close. Is there no one to warn 
her people, no one to open their eyes to this ghastly hatred 
across the North Sea, preparing stealthily for their de¬ 
struction? Will you not tell the truth in your paper, as 
I now tell it to you?” 

I told him it would be diflicult to get such things pub¬ 
lished, and still more difficult to get them believed. I 
had considerable doubt myself whether he had not exag¬ 
gerated the intensity of hatred in Germany, and, in any 
case, the possibility of their daring to challenge Great 
Britain, as long as our fleet maintained its strength and 
traditions. But I was disturbed. The little man’s words 
coincided with other warnings I had heard, from Lord 
Roberts, from visitors to Germany, from Robert Blatch- 
ford—to say nothing of W. T. Stead and his German 
“spooks.” . . . ^ohtYtT>on2i\d^ oi The Daily Chronicle, 
laughed at my report of the conversation. “Utter rub¬ 
bish!” was his opinion, and he refused to print a word. 

“Go to Germany yourself,” he said, “and write a series 
of articles likely to promote friendship between our two 
peoples and undo the harm created by newspaper hate- 
doctors and jingoes. Find out what the mass of the 
German people think about this liar talk.” 

So I went to Germany, with a number of introductions 
to prominent people and friends of England. 

It was not the first time I had visited Germany, because 
the previous year, I think, I had been to Hamburg with 
a party of journalists, and we were received like princes, 
feted sumptuously, and treated with an amazing display 
of public cordiality. There was private courtesy, too, 

220 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

most kind and amiable, and I always remember a young 
poet who took me to his house and introduced me to his 
beautiful young wife who, when I said good-by, gathered 
some roses from her garden, put them to her lips, and 
said, “Take these with my love to England.” 

But something had happened in the spirit of Germany 
since that time. The first “friend of England” to whom 
I presented a letter of introduction was a newspaper 
editor in Diisseldorf, a man of liberal principles who had 
taken a great part in arranging an exchange of visits be¬ 
tween German and British business men. He knew many 
of the Liberal politicans in England and could walk into 
the House of Commons more easily than I could. 

He seemed to be rather flustered when I called upon 
him and explained the object of my visit, and he left me 
alone in his study for a while, on pretext of speaking to 
his wife. I think he wanted me to read his leading 
article, signed at the foot of the column, in a paper which 
he laid deliberately on his desk before me. I puzzled 
through its complicated argument in involved German, 
and through its fog of rhetoric there emerged a violent 
tirade against England. 

When he came back, I tackled him on the subject. 

“I understood that you were an advocate of friendly 
relations between our two peoples? That article doesn’t 
seem to me very friendly or helpful.” 

He flushed a hot color, and said, “My views have 
undergone a change. England has behaved abominably.” 

The particular abomination which he resented most 
deeply was the warning delivered by Lloyd George of 
all people in England!—that Great Britain would sup¬ 
port French interests in Morocco, and would not tolerate 
German aggression in that region. That was at the time 
of the Agadir incident. The British attitude in that 
affair, said the Diisseldorf editor, was a clear sign that 
Great Britain challenged the right of Germany to develop 

221 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

and expand. That challenge could not be left unanswered. 
Either Germany must surrender her liberty and deny her 
imperial destiny, at the dictation of Britain, or show that 
her power was equal to her aspirations. That, anyhow, 
was the line of his argument, which we pursued at great 
length over pots of lager beer, in a restaurant where we 
dined together. 

I encountered the same argument, and more violent 
hostility, from a high ecclesiastic in Berlin, who was a 
gi^at friend of the Kaiser’s and formerly a professed 
lover of England. He was a tall, thin, handsome man, 
who spoke English perfectly, but was not very civil to 
me. Presently, as we talked of the relations between our 
two nations, he paced up and down the room with evident 
emotion, with suppressed rage, indeed, which broke at 
last through his restraint. 

“English policy,” he said, “cuts directly across our 
legitimate German rights. England is trying to hem in 
Germany, to hamper her at every turn, to humiliate her 
in every part of the world, and to prevent her economic 
development. During recent days she has not hesitated to 
affront us very deeply and deliberately. It is intolerable I” 

He spoke of an “inevitable war” with startling candor, 
and when I said something about the duty of all Chris¬ 
tian men, especially of a priest like himself, to prevent 
such an unbelievable horror, he asked harshly whether 
I had come to insult him, and touched the bell for my 
dismissal. 

Such conversations were alarming. Yet I did not be¬ 
lieve that they represented the general opinion of the 
great mass of German people. I was only able to get 
glimpses here and there in Diisseldorf and Frankfort, 
Hanover, Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden of middle-class 
and working-class thought, but wherever I was able to 
test it in casual conversation with business men, railway 
porters, laborers, hotel waiters, and so on, with whom I 

222 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

exchanged ideas in my very crude German, or their re¬ 
markably good English (in the case of commercial men 
and waiters), I found utter incredulity regarding the 
possibility of war between England and Germany, and a 
contempt of the sword-rattling and “shining armor” of 
the Kaiser and the military caste. 

I was, for instance, in a company of commercial men 
at Abendessen in a hotel at Leipzig, when the topic of 
conversation was the Zabern affair, in which Lieutenant 
von Forstner had drawn his sword upon civilians—and a 
cripple—who had jeered at him for swaggering down the 
sidewalk like a popinjay. The Crown Prince had sent 
him a telegram of approbation for his defense of his 
uniform and caste. But, one and all, the commercial 
men with whom I sat expressed their loathing of this 
military arrogance, and were indignant with those who 
defended its absurdity. I remember the German who sat 
next to me had been a designer in a porcelain factory in 
the English potteries for many years. With him I talked 
quietly of the chance of war between England and Ger¬ 
many. “What is the real feeling of the ordinary folk in 
Germany?” I asked. He answered with what I am cer¬ 
tain was absolute sincerity—though he was wrong, as 
history proved. He told me that, outside the military 
caste, there was no war feeling in Germany, and that the 
idea of a conflict with England was abhorrent and unbe¬ 
lievable to the German people. “If there were to be 
war with England,” he said, “we should weep at the 
greatest tragedy that could befall mankind.” 

There were many people I met who held that view, 
without hypocrisy, and their sincerity at that time is not 
disproved because when the tocsin of war was sounded, 
the fever of hate took possession of them. 

It was Edward Bernstein, the leader of the Socialists, 
who warned me of the instability of the pacifist faith 
professed by German democrats. “If war breaks out,” 

223 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

he said, “German Socialists will march as one man against 
any enemy of the Fatherland. Although theoretically 
they are against war, neither they nor any other Socialists 
have reached a plane of development which would give 
them the strength to resist loyalty to the Flag and the 
old code of patriotism, when once their nation was in¬ 
volved, right or wrong.” 

I tried to get the ideas of German youth on the sub¬ 
ject of war with England, and I had an excellent oppor¬ 
tunity and an illuminating conversation with the students 
of Leipzig University. A group of these young men, 
who spoke excellent English, allowed me to question them, 
and were highly amused and interested. 

“Do you hate England?” I asked. 

There was a rousing chorus of “Yes I” 

“Why do you hate England?” 

One young man acted as spokesman for the others, 
who signified their assent from time to time. The first 
reason for hatred of England, he said, was because when 
a German boy was shown the map of the world and 
when he asked what all the red “splodges” on it signified, 
he was told that all that territory belonged to England. 
That aroused his natural envy. Later in life, said this 
young man, he understood by historical reading that Eng¬ 
land had built up the British Empire by a series of wars, 
explorations, and commercial adventures which gave her 
a just claim to possession. They had no quarrel with 
that. They recognized the strength and greatness of the 
English people in the past. But now they saw that Eng¬ 
land was no longer great. She was decadent and in¬ 
efficient. Her day was done. They hated her now as a 
worn-out old monster who still tried to grab and hold, 
and prevent other races from developing their genius, 
but had no military power with which to defend their 
possessions. England was playing a game of bluff. Ger¬ 
many, conscious of her newborn greatness, her immense 

224 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

industrial genius, her vital strength, needing elbow room 
and free spaces of the earth, would not allow a degenerate 
people to stand across her path. Germany hated Eng¬ 
land for her arrogance, masking weakness, and her hypo¬ 
critical professions of friendship, which concealed envy 
and fear. 

All this was said, at greater length, with admirable 
good humor and no touch of personal discourtesy. But it 
made me thoughtful and uneasy. The boy was doubtless 
exaggerating a point of view, but if such talk were taking 
place in German universities, it boded no good for the 
peace of the world. 

I returned to England, perplexed, and not convinced, 
one way or the other. As far as I could read the riddle 
of Germany, public opinion was divided by two opposing 
views. The military caste, the old Junker crowd, and 
their satellites, ecclesiastical and official, with, probably 
the Civil Service, were beating up the spirit of aggression, 
and playing for war. The great middle class, and the 
German people in the mass, desired only to get on with 
their work, to develop their commerce, and to enjoy a 
peaceful home life in increasing comfort. The question 
of future peace or war lay with the view which would 
prevail. I believed that, without unnecessary provoca¬ 
tion on the part of England, rather with generous and 
friendly relations, the peaceful disposition of the German 
people would prevail over the military caste and its inten¬ 
sive propaganda. . . . 

I was wrong, and the articles I wrote in an analytical 
but friendly spirit were worse than useless, though I am 
still convinced that the German people as a whole did 
not want war, until their rulers persuaded them that the 
Fatherland was in danger, called to their patriotism, and 
let loose all the primitive emotions, sentiments, ideals, 
passions, and cruelties which stir the hearts of peoples, 
when war is declared. 


225 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

After that visit to Germany, I went several times to 
Ireland, and although there seemed to be no link between 
these two missions, I am certain now that in the mind of 
German agents, politicians, and military strategists, the 
situation in Ireland was not left out of account in their 
estimate of war chances. With labor “unrest” from the 
Clyde to Tonypandy, with suffragette outrages revealing 
a weakness and lack of virility (from the German point 
of view) in English manhood, and with Ireland on the 
edge of civil war which would involve great numbers of 
British troops, England was losing her power of attack 
and defense. So as we know, German agents, like the 
Baron von Zedlitz, were writing home in their reports. 

Sir Edward Carson, afterward Lord Carson, with 
F. E. Smith, afterward Lord Birkenhead (so does Eng¬ 
land reward her rebels!) were arranging a bloody civil 
war in Ireland, which, but for a Great War, would have 
spread to England, without let or hindrance from the 
British government. 

When the Home Rule Bill, under Asquith’s premier¬ 
ship, was nearing its last stages, Carson raised an army 
of Ulstermen and invited every Protestant and Unionist 
to take a solemn oath in a holy league and covenant to 
resist Home Rule to the very death. I was an eyewitness 
of many remarkable and historic scenes when “King 
Carson,” as he was called in irony by Irish Home Rulers, 
inspected his troops, made a triumphal progress through 
Ulster, stirring up old fires of racial and religious hatred. 

There was a good deal of play-acting about all this, 
and Carson was melodramatic in all his speeches and 
gestures, with a touch of Irving in the rendering of his 
pose as a grim and resolute patriot and leader of 
Protestant forces, but there was real passion behind it 
all, and the sincerity of fanaticism. If it came to the 
ordeal of battle, these young farmers and shopkeepers 
who paraded in battalions before Carson and his lieuten- 

226 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

ants, marching with good discipline, a strong and sturdy 
type o^ manhood, would fight with the courage and ruth- 
lessnesi of men inspired by hatred and bigotry. 

The British government pooh-poohed Carson’s “army” 
and des'ribed it as an unarmed rabble. But a very brief 
inquiry t onvinced me that large quantities of arms were 
being imported into Belfast and distributed through 
Ulster. There was hardly a pretense at secrecy, and 
the Great Western Railway authorities showed me boxes 
bearing large red labels with the word “Firearms” boldly 
printed thereon. The proprietor of one of the Belfast 
hotels led me down into his cellars and showed me cases 
of rifles stacked as high as the ceiling. He told me they 
came from Germany. I went round to the gunsmith 
shops, and I was told that they were selling cheap re¬ 
volvers “like hot cakes.” There was hardly a man in 
Ulster who had not got a firearm of some kind or other. 
“It’s good for business,” said one of the gunsmiths, 
laughing candidly, “but one of these days the things will 
go off, and there will be the devil to pay. Why the 
British government allows it is beyond understanding.” 

The British government did not acknowledge the truth 
of it. I made a detailed report of my investigations to 
Robert Donald, who passed it on to Winston Churchill, 
and his comment was the incredulous remark, “Gibbs has 
had his leg pulled.” But it was Churchill’s leg that was 
pulled, very badly, and he must have had a nasty shock 
when there were full descriptive reports of a gun-running 
exploit, done with perfect impunity, by the conspiracy of 
Ulster officers and leaders, military advisers, and men of 
all classes, down to the jarveys of the jaunting cars. 
Carson had armed his troops—with German rifles and 
ammunition. 

In view of later history, there must have been some 
gentlemen of Ulster whose consciences were twinged by 
those dealings with Germany, and by allusions made in 

227 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the heat of political speeches to their preference for the 
German Emperor rather than a Home-rule Hoose of 
Parliament in Dublin. 

Religious fanaticism was at the back of it all in the 
minds of the rank and file. Catholic laborers were 
chased out of the shipyards by their Protestar t fellow 
workers, and hardly a day passed without brut? . assaults 
on them, as was proved by the list of patients i(^ the hos¬ 
pitals suffering from bashed heads and bruised bodies. I 
saw with my own eyes gangs of Ulster Protestants fall 
upon Catholic citizens and kick them senseless. Need¬ 
less to say, there was retaliation when the chance came, 
and woe betide any Ulsterman who ventured alone 
through the Catholic quarter. 

The mediaeval malignancy of this vendetta was revealed 
to me among a thousand other proofs by a draper’s 
assistant in a shop down the Royal Avenue. I was buy¬ 
ing a collar stud or something, and recognizing me as an 
Englishman, he began to talk politics. 

“If they try to put Home Rule over us,” he said, “I 
shall fight. I’m a pretty good shot, and if a Catholic 
shows his head. I’ll plug him.” 

He pulled out a rifle, which he kept concealed behind 
some bundles of linen, and told me he spent his Saturday 
afternoons in target practice. 

“What do you think of this? Good shooting, eh?” 

He pulled out a handful of pennies and showed me 
how at so many paces (I forget the range) he had 
plugged the head of His Majesty, King George V. It 
seemed to me a queer way of proving his loyalty to the 
British crown and Constitution. 

Carson’s way of loyalty was no less strange. By 
what method of logic this great lawyer could justify, 
as a proof of loyalty and patriotism, his raising of armed 
forces to resist an Act of Parliament passed by the King 
with the consent of the people, passes my simple under- 

228 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

standing. I can understand rebellion against the law and 
the Crown, for Liberty’s sake, or for passion’s sake, or 
for the destruction of civilization, or for the enforce¬ 
ment of any kind of villainy. But I cannot understand 
rebellion against the law and the Crown in order to 
prove one’s passionate loyalty to the law, and one’s ardent 
devotion to the King. 

Nor can I understand how those who condemn the 
“direct action” of Labor in the way of general strikes and 
other methods of demanding “rights” (as Lords Carson 
and Birkenhead and Londonderry condemned such revo¬ 
lutionary threats), can uphold as splendid heroism the 
menace of bloody civil war by a minority which refused 
to accept the verdict of the government and peoples of 
Great Britain and Ireland. 

Sir Edward Carson was an honest man, a great gentle¬ 
man in his manner, a great lawyer in repute, but his blind 
bigotry, some dark passion in him, made him adopt a 
line of action which has caused much blood to flow in 
Ireland and made one of the blackest chapters in modern 
history. For it was the raising of the Ulster Volunteers 
which led to the raising of the Irish Republican Army, 
and the armed resistance to Home Rule which led to 
Sinn Fein, and a thousand murders. It might have led, 
and very nearly led to civil war in England as well as in 
Ireland. When the British Officers in the Curragh Camp 
refused to lead their troops to disarm Ulster, and re¬ 
signed their commissions rather than fulfil such an order, 
the shadow of civil war crept rather close, and there were 
politicians in England who were ready to risk it, as when 
Winston Churchill raised the cry, “The Army versus the 
People.” 

But another shadow was creeping over Europe, and 
fell with a chill horror upon the heart of England, when, 
as it were out of the blue sky of a summer in 1914, there 
came the menace of a war which would call many great 

229 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

nations to arms, and deluge the fields of Europe in the 
blood of youth. Ireland—suffragettes—industrial un¬ 
rest, how trivial and foolish even were such internal 
squabbles when civilization itself was challenged by this 
abomination! 

In June of 1914—June!—there was a great banquet 
given in London to the editors of German newspapers, 
where I renewed acquaintance with a number of men 
whom I had met the previous year in Germany. Lord 
Burnham, of The Daily Telegraph, presided over the 
gathering, and made an eloquent speech, affirming the 
unbreakable ties of friendship between our two peoples. 
There were many eloquent speeches by other British jour¬ 
nalists, expressing their admiration for German character, 
science, art, and social progress. A distinguished dra¬ 
matic critic was emotional at the thought of the old kin¬ 
ship of the German and English peoples. The German 
editors responded with equal cordiality, with surpassing 
eloquence of admiration for English liberty, literature, 
and.life. There was much handshaking, raising of glasses, 
drinking of toasts. ... It was two months before 
August of 1914. 


# 


230 


XVIII 


F leet street in the days before the declaration 
of war was like the nerve center of the nation’s 
psychology, and throbbed with all the emotions of fear, 
hysteria, incredulity, and patriotic fever, deadened at 
times by a kind of intellectual stupor, which took posses¬ 
sion of her people. 

It was self-convicted of stupendous ignorance. None 
of those leader writers, who for years had written with 
an Immense assumption of knowledge, had revealed this 
imminence of the world conflict. Some of them had 
played a game of party politics with “the German men¬ 
ace,” and had used it as a stick for their political oppo¬ 
nents. The Daily Mail, favoring a big navy, and more 
capital ships, had led the chorus of “We want eight and 
we won’t wait.” The Daily News, favoring disarma¬ 
ment, had denied the existence of any aggressive spirit 
in Germany. According to the political color of the 
newspapers. Liberal or Tory, the question of German 
relations had been written up by the leader writers and 
news had been carefully selected by the foreign news 
editors. But the public had never been given any clear 
or authoritative guidance; they had never been warned 
by the press as a whole, rising above the political game, 
that the very life of the nation was in jeopardy, and that 
all they had and were would be challenged to the death. 
Murder trials, suffragette raids, divorce court news, the 
social whirligig, the passionate folly in Ireland, had been 
the stuff with which the press had fed the public mind to 
the very eve of this crash into the abyss of horror. 

Even now, when war was certain, the press said, “It is 

231 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

impossible I” as indeed the nation did, in its little homes, 
because their imagination refused to admit the possi¬ 
bility of that monstrous cataclysm. And when war was 
declared, the press said, “It will be over in three months.” 
Indeed, men I knew in Fleet Street, old colleagues of 
mine, said, “It will be over in three weeks I” Their 
theory seemed to be that Germany had gone mad and that 
with England, France, and Russia attacking on all sides, 
she would collapse like a pricked bladder. 

Looking back on that time, I find a little painful 
amusement in the thought of our immeasurable ignorance 
as to the meaning of modern warfare. We knew just 
nothing about its methods or machinery, nor about its 
immensity of range and destruction. 

After the first shock and stupor, news editors began 
to get busy, as though this war were going to be like the 
South-African affair, remote, picturesque, and romantic. 
They appointed a number of correspondents to “cover” 
the various fronts. They engaged press photographers 
and cinema men. War correspondents of the old school, 
like Bennett Burleigh, H. W. Nevinson, and Frederick 
Villiers, called at the War Office for their credentials, col¬ 
lected their kit, and took riding exercise in the Park, 
believing that they would need horses in this war on 
the western front, as great generals—dear simple souls 
—believed that cavalry could ride through German 
trenches. 

The War Office kept a little group of distinguished 
old-time war correspondents kicking their heels in waiting 
rooms of Whitehall, week after week, and month after 
month, always with the promise that wonderful arrange¬ 
ments would be made for them “shortly.” Meanwhile, 
and at the very outbreak of war, a score of younger jour¬ 
nalists, without waiting for War Office credentials, and 
disobeying War Office orders, dashed over to France and 
Belgium, and plunged into the swirl and backwash of this 

232 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

frightful drama. Some of them had astounding and 
perilous adventures, in sheer ignorance, at first, of the 
hazards they took, but it was not long before they under¬ 
stood and knew, with a shock that changed their youthful 
levity of adventure into the gravity of men who have 
looked into the flames of hell, and the torture chamber 
of human agony. Henceforth, between them and those 
who had not seen, there was an impassable gulf of 
understanding. . . . 

Owing to the rigid refusal of the War Office, under 
Lord Kitchener’s orders, to give any official credentials 
to correspondents, the British press, as hungry for news 
as the British public whose little professional army had 
disappeared behind a deathlike silence, printed any scrap 
of description, any glimmer of truth, any wild statement, 
rumor, fairy tale, or deliberate lie, which reached them 
from France or Belgium; and it must be admitted that 
the liars had a great time. 

A vast amount of lying was done by newspaper men 
who accepted the official statements of French Ministers, 
hiding the frightful truth of the German advance. It 
was an elaboration of the French communiques which in 
the first weeks of the war were devoid of truth. But a 
great deal of imaginative lying was accomplished by 
young journalists, who at Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, 
Ghent, or Paris, invented marvelous adventures of their 
own, exaggerated affairs of outposts into stupendous bat¬ 
tles, and defeated the Germans time and time again in 
verbal victories, while the German war machine was driv¬ 
ing like a knife into the hearts of Belgium and France. 

Reading the English newspapers in those early days of 
the war, with their stories of starving Germany, their 
atrpcity-mongei 4 ng, their wild perversions of truth, a 
journalist proud of his profession must blush for shame 
at its degradation and insanity. Its excuse and defense 
lie in the psychological storm that the war created in the 

233 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

soul of humanity, from which Fleet Street itself—very 
human—did not escape; in the natural agony of desire to 
find some reason for hopefulness; in the patriotic neces¬ 
sity of preventing despair from overwhelming popular 
opinion in the first shock of the enemy’s .advance; and in 
the desperate anxiety of all men and women whose heri¬ 
tage and liberties were at stake, to get some glimpse be¬ 
hind the heavy shutters of secrecy that had been slammed 
down by military censorship. 

I was one of those who did not wait, for official per¬ 
mits, and plunged straightway into the vortex of the war 
game. In self-defense I must plead that I was not one 
of the liars! I did not manufacture atrocities, and had 
some temperamental difficulty in believing those that were 
true, because I believed in the decency of the common 
man, even in the decency of the German common man. I 
did not invent imaginary adventures, but found tragedy 
enough, and drama enough, in the things I saw, and the 
truth that I found. As I had two companions most of 
the time in those early days, whose honor is acknowl¬ 
edged by all who know them—H. M. Tomlinson and 
W. M. Massey—their evidence supported my own articles 
which, like theirs, revealed something to our people of 
the enormous history that was happening. 

Strangely, as it now seems to me, I was appointed 
artist correspondent to The Graphic, as I had been in the 
Bulgarian war, and I actually made some sketches of 
French mobilization and preparations for war, which 
were redrawn and published. But my old paper. The 
Daily Chronicle, desired my services and I changed over 
to them, and abandoned the pencil for the pen, with The 
Graphic's consent, a few days after the declaration of 
war. 

I had crossed over to Paris on the night the reservists 
had been called to the colors in England, although so far 
war had not been declared by England or France. But 

234 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the fleet was cleared for action, and ready, and that night 
destroyers were out in the English Channel and their 
searchlights swept our packet boat, where groups of 
Frenchmen who had been clerks, hairdressers, and shop 
assistants in England were singing “The Marseillaise” 
with a kind of religious ecstasy, while in the saloon a 
party of Lancashire lads were getting fuddled and promis¬ 
ing themselves “a good time” on a week-end trip to 
Paris, utterly unconscious of war and its realities. 

In The Daily Chronicle office in Paris, where I had 
done night duty so often, my friend and colleague, Henri 
Bourdin, was white to the lips with nervous emotion, and 
constantly answered telephonic inquiries from French 
journalists: “Is England coming in? Nothing official, 
eh? Is it certain England will come in? You think so? 
Name of God! why doesn’t England say the word?” 

It was the consuming thought in all French minds. 
They were desperate for an answer to their questions. 
Because of the delay, Paris was suspicious, angry, ready 
for an outbreak of passion against the English tourists, 
who were besieging the railway stations, and against 
English journalists, who were in a fever of anxiety. 

I saw the unforgetable scenes of mobilization in Paris, 
which made one’s very heart weep with the tragedy of 
those partings between men and women, who clung to 
each other and kissed for the last time—so many of them 
for the last time—and on the night of August 2nd I went 
with the first trainload of reservists to Belfort, Toul, 
and Nancy. All through the night, at every station in 
which the train stopped, there was the sound of march¬ 
ing men, and the song of “The Marseillaise”: 

^^Formez vos bataillonsP* 

The youth of France was trooping from the fields and 
workshops, not in ignorance of the sacrifice to which they 
were called, not light-heartedly, but with a simple and 

235 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

splendid devotion to their country which now, in remem¬ 
brance, after the years of massacre and of disillusion, 
still fills me with emotion. . . . 

I do not intend here to give a narrative of my own 
experiences of war. I have written them elsewhere, and 
what do they matter, anyhow, in those years when mil¬ 
lions of men faced death daily and passed through an 
adventure of life beyond all power of imagination of 
civilized men? I will rather deal with the subject of the 
Press in war, and with the peculiar difficulties and work 
of the correspondents, especially in the early days. 

For the first few months of the war we had no status 
whatever. Indeed, to be quite plain, we were outlaws, 
subject to immediate arrest (and often arrested) by any 
officer, French or British, who discovered us in the war 
zone. Kitchener refused to sanction the scheme, which 
had been fully prepared before the war, for the appoint¬ 
ment of a small body of war correspondents whose honor 
and reputation were acknowledged, and gave orders that 
any journalist found in the field of war should be instantly 
expelled and have his passport canceled. The French 
were even more severe, and sent out stern orders from 
their General Headquarters for the arrest of any jour¬ 
nalist found trespassing in the zone of war. 

For some time, however, it was impossible to enforce 
these rules. The German advance through Belgium and 
Northern France was only a day or two, or an hour or 
two behind the stampede of vast populations in flight 
from the enemy. The roads were filled with these suc¬ 
cessive tides of refugees. The trains were stormed by 
panic-stricken folk, and even the troop trains found room 
in the corridors and on the roofs for swarms of civilians, 
men and women. Dressed in civilian clothes, unshaved 
and unwashed, like any of these people, how could a cor¬ 
respondent be distinguished or arrested? Who was go¬ 
ing to bother about him? Even the spy mania which 

236 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

seized France very quickly and feverishly did not create, 
for some time, a network of restriction close enough to 
catch us. I traveled for weeks in the war zone on a pass 
stamped by French headquarters, permitting me to re¬ 
ceive the daily communique from the War Office in Paris. 
I had dozens of other passes and permis de sejour from 
local authorities and police, which enabled me to travel 
with perfect facility, provided I was able to bluff the 
military guards at the railway stations, who were gen¬ 
erally satisfied with those bunches of dirty passes and 
official-looking stamps. There was, too, a dual control 
in France, and a divergence of views regarding war cor¬ 
respondents. The civil authorities—prefects, mayors, 
and police—favored our presence, desired to let us know 
the suffering and heroism of their people, and welcomed 
us with every courtesy, because we were English and 
their allies. Often they turned a blind eye to military 
commands, or were ignorant of the orders against us. 

Massey, Tomlinson, and I, working together in close 
comradeship, in those first weeks of war, traveled in 
Northern France and Belgium with what now seems to 
me an amazing freedom. We were caught up in the tide 
of flight from French and Belgian cities. We saw the re¬ 
treat of the French army through Amiens, from which 
city we escaped only a short time before the entry of 
Von Kluck’s columns. We came into the midst of the 
British retreat at Creil, where Sir John French had set 
up his headquarters; mingled with the crowds of English 
and Scottish stragglers, French infantry and engineers, 
who were falling back on Paris, before the spearheads 
of the German invasion, with a world of tragedy behind 
them, yet with a faith in victory that was mysterious and 
sublime. We had no knowledge of the enemy’s wherea¬ 
bouts and set out in simple ignorance for towns already 
in German hands, or alighted at stations threatened with 
immediate capture. So it was at Beauvais, where we 

237 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

were the only passengers in a train that pulled over a 
bridge where a cuirassier stood by bags of dynamite 
ready to blow it up, and where the last of the civilian 
population had trudged away from streets strewn with 
broken glass. Only by a strange spell of luck did we 
escape capture by the enemy, toward whose line we went, 
partly in ignorance of the enormous danger, partly with 
foolhardy deliberation, and always drugged with desire 
to see and know the worst or the best of this frightful 
drama. 

We were often exhausted with fatigue. On the day 
we came into a deserted Paris, stricken with an agony of 
apprehension that the Germans would enter, I had to be 
carried to bed by Tomlinson and Massey, as helpless as a 
child. A few days later, Massey, a strong man till then, 
but now ashen-faced and weak, could not drag one leg 
after another. We had worn down our nervous strength 
to what seemed like the last strand, yet we went on again, 
in the wagons of troop trains, sleeping in corridors, the 
baggage rooms of railway stations, or carriages crammed 
with French poilus, who told narratives of war with a 
simplicity and realism that froze one’s blood. 

We followed up the German retreat from the Marne, 
when the bodies of the dead were being buried in heaps 
and the fields were littered with the wreckage of battle, 
and then went north to Dunkirk, bombed every day by 
German aeroplanes, but crowded with French fusiliers, 
marins, Arabs, British aviators of the Royal Navy, and 
Belgian refugees. Here I parted for a time with Massey 
and Tomlinson, and in a brief experience as a stretcher 
bearer with an ambulance column attached to the Belgian 
army, saw into the flaming heart of war, at Dixmude, 
Nieuport, and other places, where I became familiar with 
the sight of death, dirty with the blood of wounded men, 
and sick with the agony of this human shambles—a story 
which I have told in my book. The Soul of the War, 

238 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Other men, old friends of mine in Fleet Street, were 
having similar adventures, taking the same, or greater, 
hazards, dodging the military authorities with more or 
less luck. Hamilton Fyfe, then of The Daily Mail and 
now editor of The Daily Herald, was caught in a motor 
car by a patrol of German Uhlans, and only escaped be¬ 
coming a prisoner of war by an amazing freak of fortune. 
George Curnock, also of The Daily Mail, was arrested 
by the French as a spy, and very nearly shot. A little 
group of correspondents—among them Ashmead Bartlett 
—were flung into the Cherche Midi prison and treated 
for a time like common criminals. I happened to fall 
into conversation with a French officer, who had actually 
arrested them. He was strongly suspicious of me, and 
asked whether I knew these gentlemen, all of whose 
names he had in his pocket book. I admitted that I had 
heard of one or two of them by repute, and expected to 
be arrested on the spot. But this officer had been French 
master at an English public school and was anxious, for 
some reason, to get an uncensored letter to the head 
master. I told him I was going to England, and offered 
to take it. ... I was not arrested that time. 

Another adventurer was young Lucian Jones, son of 
the famous playwright, Henry Arthur Jones. He made 
frequent trips to the Belgian front and was one of the 
last to leave Antwerp after the siege, which was not a 
pleasant adventure when heavy shells smashed the houses 
on every side of him. As he made no disguise whatever 
of his profession and purpose, he was sent back to Eng¬ 
land and forbidden to show his face again. He took 
the next boat back, and was again arrested and flung into 
a dirty prison. His editor, who received word of his 
plight, sent a message to General Bridges, asking for his 
release, and obtained the brusque answer, “Let the fellow 
rot I”—only it was a stronger word than “fellow.” 

One great difficulty we had in those days was to get 

239 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

our messages back to our newspapers. Sometimes wc 
intrusted them to any chance acquaintance who was mak¬ 
ing his way to England. Several times we had to get 
back to the coast, in those terrible refugee trains, to 
bribe some purser on a cross-Channel steamer. When 
that became too dangerous—because it was strictly for¬ 
bidden by the military and nayal authorities—wc made 
the journey to London, handed in our messages, and hur¬ 
ried back again the same day to France. The mental 
state of our newspaper colleagues exasperated us. They 
seemed to have no understanding whatever of what W’as 
happening on the other side, no conception of that world 
of agony. “Had a good time?” asked a sub-editor, hur¬ 
rying along the corridor with proofs—and I wanted to 
choke him, because of his placid unconsciousness of the 
things that had seared my eyes and soul. 

I could not bear to talk with men who still said, “It 
will be over in three months,” and who still believed that 
war was a rather jolly, romantic adventure, and that our 
little professional army was more than a match for the 
Germans who were arrant cowards and no better than 
sheep. In Fleet Street, at that time, there was no vision 
of what war meant to the women of France and Belgium, 
to the children of the refugees, to the mothers and fathers 
of the fighting men. It had not touched us closely in 
those first weeks of war. 

My vexation was great one morning, after one of these 
journeys home, when I missed the train to Dover, and 
my good comrades Massey and Tomlinson—by just a 
minute. Perhaps I should never see them again. They 
would be lost in the vortex. 

“Take a special train,” said my wife. 

The idea startled me, not having the mentality or re¬ 
sources of a millionaire. 

“It’s worth it,” said my wife, who is a woman of big 
ideas. 


240 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I turned to the station master, who was standing at 
the closed gates of the continental platform. 

“How long would it take you to provide a special 
train?” 

He smiled. 

“No longer than it would take you to pay over the 
money.” 

“How much?” 

“Twenty-two pounds.” 

I consulted my wife again with raised eyebrows, and 
she nodded. 

I went into a little office, half undressed, and pulled 
out of my belt a pile of French gold pieces. By the time 
they had been counted and a receipt given—no more 
than three minutes—there was a train with an engine and 
three carriages, a driver and a guard, ready for me on 
the line to Dover. My small boy (as he was then) gazed 
in awe and admiration at the magic trick. I waved to 
him as the train went off with me. I was signaled all 
down the line, and in the stations we passed porters and 
officials stared and saluted as the train flashed by. Doubt¬ 
less they thought I was a great general going to win the 
war! At Dover I was only one minute behind the express 
I had lost. Massey and Tomlinson were pacing the 
platform disconsolately at the loss of their comrade. 
They could not believe their eyes when I walked up and 
said “Hello!” So we went back to a new series of 
adventures. 

I used with success, three times running, another 
method of getting my “dispatches” to Fleet Street. After 
the third time some intuition told me to change the plan. 
At that time, as all through the war, a number of King’s 
messengers—mostly men of high rank and reputation— 
traveled continually between British G.H.Q. and the War 
Office, with private documents from the Commander-in- 
Chief. Three times did I accost one of these officers—a 

241 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

different man each time—in an easy and confidential 
manner. 

“Are you going back to Whitehall, Sir?” 

“Yes. What can I do for you?” 

“I shall be much obliged if you will put this letter in 
your bag, and deliver it at the War Office.” 

“Certainly, my dear fellow!” 

My letter was addressed to The Daily Dhronicle^ care 
of the War Office, and, much to the surprise of my editor, 
was punctually delivered, by a War-Office messenger. But 
my intuition was right. After the third time the editor 
of The Daily Chronicle received word from the War 
Office that if Gibbs sent any more of his articles by King’s 
messenger, they would be destroyed. 

The method of delivery became easier afterward, be¬ 
cause the newspapers organized a series of their own 
couriers between England and France, and that system 
served until the whole courier service was rounded up 
and forbidden to set foot in France again. 

It was amazing that my articles, and those of my fellow 
correspondents, were allowed to appear in the news¬ 
papers, in spite of military prohibition. But the press 
censorship, which had been set up by the government 
under the control of F. E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead, 
was not under direct military authority, and was much 
more tolerant of correspondents who evaded military 
regulations. I wrote scores of columns during the first 
few months of the war, mostly of a descriptive character, 
and very few lines were blacked out by the censors. So 
far from being in the black books of the press censorship 
as established at that time, I was sent for by F. E. Smith, 
who thanked me for my narratives and promised to give 
personal attention to any future dispatches I might send. 
This was at the very time when Kitchener himself gave 
orders for my arrest, after reading a long article of 
mine from the Belgian front. 

242 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I was also received several times by Sir William Tyr¬ 
rell, Secretary to the Foreign Office, who questioned me 
about my knowledge of the situation and begged me. to 
call on him whenever I came back, although he knew that 
orders had been given to cancel my passport and that I 
was in the black book, for immediate arrest, at any port. 
It was Sir William Tyrrell, indeed, who, with great kind¬ 
ness provided me with a new passport after I had fallen 
into very hot water indeed. 

It was F. E. Smith who read, approved, and even 
strengthened by a phrase or two, a sensational dispatch 
written by my friend Hamilton Fyfe and a colleague 
named Moore, which revealed for the first time to the 
British nation the terrible ordeal and sacrifice of the little 
Regular Army in the retreat from Mons. It was too 
sensational, perhaps, in its account of “broken divisions,” 
and “remnants of battalions”; and its tone was too tragic 
and despairing, so that there was one black Sunday in 
England which will never be forgotten by those who lived 
through it, because there seemed no hope for the British 
Army, or for France. 

As it happened, Massey, Tomlinson, and I had covered 
the same ground as Fyfe and his companion, had seen the 
same things, and had agonized with the same apprehen¬ 
sion. But owing largely, as I must honestly and heartily 
say, to the cool judgment and fine faith of Tomlinson, 
our deduction from those facts and the spirit of what we 
wrote was far more optimistic—and future history proved 
us to be right—so that they helped to restore confidence 
in England and Scotland, when they appeared on Mon¬ 
day morning, following Fyfe’s terrible dispatch. ^ 

But Fyfe did a great service to the nation and the 
Allies, by the truth he told, somewhat overcolored as it 
was. It awakened Great Britain from its false com¬ 
placency. It revealed to the nation, for the first time, 
the awful truth that our little Regular Army, magnificent 

243 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

as it was, could not withstand the tremendous weight of 
the German advance on the left flank of the French, was 
not sufficient to turn the scales of victory in favor of 
France, and was in desperate need of reinforcements from 
the untrained manhood at home. It shook the spirit of 
England like an earthquake, and brought it face to face 
with the menace of its life and liberties. For if France 
went down, we should follow. . . . The recruiting booths 
were stormed by the young manhood of England and 
Scotland, who had not joined up because they had believed 
that myth: “The war will be over in three months.” 

There was tremendous anger in the War Office at the 
publication of that article by Fyfe and Moofte, and F. E. 
Smith, as the press censor, was severel)^cf^promised. 

The truth was that the military mind was obsessed with 
the necessity of fighting this war—“our war” as the 
regulars called it—in the dark, while the nonmilitary 
mind knew that such a policy was impossible, and might 
be disastrous, in a war costing such a frightful sum of 
life, and putting such a strain upon the nation’s heart and 
spirit. 

Looking back on my experiences as an unauthorized 
correspondent in that early part of the war, I must con¬ 
fess now that I was hardly justified in evading military 
law, and that I might have been found guilty, justly, of a 
serious crime against the Allied cause. By some frightful 
indiscretion (which I did not commit) I or any other of 
those correspondents might have endangered the position 
of our troops, or the French army, by giving information 
useful to the enemv. 

_ j > 

The main fault, however, lay with the War Office, and 
especially with Lord Kitchener, whose imagination did 
not realize that this war could not JirfVought in the dark, 
as some little affair with Indian hillmen on the northwest 
frontier. The immense anxiety of the nation, with its 
army fighting behind the veil while tl^fate of civilization 

244 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

hung in the balance, could not and would not be satisfied 
with the few lines of official communiques which told 
nothing and hid the truth. . . . 

Gradually the net was drawn tighter, until, in the first 
months of 1915? it'was impossible for any correspondent 
to travel in the war zone without arrest. I had come 
home to get a change of kit, as my clothes were caked 
with blood and mud, after supporting wounded men in 
Belgium. It was then that I heard of Kitchener’s orders 
for my arrest and was greeted with surprise and appre¬ 
hension by Robert Donald and the staff of The Daily 
Chronicle, who had sent over two messengers (who had 
never reached me) to warn me of my peril. 

Next time I went to France I was provided with won¬ 
derful credentials as a special commissioner of the British 
Red Cross, with Instructions to report on the hospital 
and medical needs of the army In the field. These docu¬ 
ments were signed by Illustrious names, and covered with 
red seals. I was satisfied they would pass me to any part 
of the front. ... I was arrested before I left the boat 
at Havre and taken by two detectives to General Wil¬ 
liams, the camp commander. He raged at me with an 
extreme violence of language, took possession of my pass¬ 
port and credentials, and put me under open arrest at 
the Hotel TortonI, In charge of six detectives. Here I 
remained for ten days or so, unable to communicate my 
ignominious situation to the authorities of the Red Cross, 
upon whose authority I had come. Fortunately I became 
good friends with the detectives, who were excellent fel¬ 
lows, and with whom I used to have my meals. It was 
by the kindness of one of them that I was able to send 
through a message to the editor of The Daily Chronicle, 
and shortly afterward General Williams graciously per¬ 
mitted me to return to England. 

It looked as though my career as a war correspondent 
had definitely closed. I had violated every regulation. I 

245 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

had personally angered Lord Kitchener. I was on the 
black books of the detectives at every port, and General 
Williams solemnly warned me that if I returned to France, 
I would be put up against a white wall, with unpleasant 
consequences. 

Strange as it appears, the military authorities blotted 
out my sins when at last they appointed five official war 
correspondents with a recognized status in the British 
armies on the Western Front. No longer did I have to 
dodge staff officers, and disguise myself as a refugee. In 
khaki, with a green armlet denoting my service, I could 
face generals, and even the Commander-in-Chief himself, 
without a quiver, and with my four comrades was 
recognized as an officer and a gentleman, with some 
reservations. 


XIX 


T he appointment and work of five official war cor¬ 
respondents (of whom I was one from first to last) 
caused.an extraordinary amount of perturbation at British 
General Headquarters. Staff officers of the old Regular 
Army were at first exceedingly hostile to the idea, and 
to us. They were deeply suspicious that we might be 
dirty dogs who would reveal military secrets which would 
imperil the British front. They had a conviction that 
we were “prying around” for no good purpose, and 
would probably “give away the whole show.” 

Fear, personal and professional, was in the minds of 
some of the generals, it is certain. We found that many 
of the regulations to which we were subject—until we 
broke them down—were much more to safeguard the 
reputation and cover up the mistakes of the High Com¬ 
mand than to prevent the enemy from having information 
which might be of use to him. They were afraid of the 
British public, of politicians, and of newspapers, and 
were profoundly uneasy lest we should dig up scandals, 
raise newspaper sensations, and cause infernal trouble 
generally. 

I can quite sympathize with their nervousness, for if 
newspapers had adopted ordinary journalistic methods 
of sensation mongering, the position of the Army Com¬ 
mand would have been intolerable. But this must be said 
for the newspaper press in the Great War—whatever its 
faults, and they were many—proprietors and editors sub¬ 
ordinated everything to a genuine and patriotic desire to 
“play the game,” to support the army, and to avoid any 

247 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

criticism or controversy which might hamper the military 
chiefs or demoralize the nation. 

As far as the five war correspondents were concerned, 
we had no other desire than to record the truth as fully 
as possible without handing information to the enemy, 
and to describe the life and actions of our fighting men 
so that the nation and the world should understand their 
valor, their suffering, and their achievement. We iden¬ 
tified ourselves absolutely with the armies in the field, 
and we wiped out of our minds all thought of personal 
“scoops,” and all temptation to write one word which 
would make the task of officers and men more difficult or 
dangerous. There was no need of censorship of our dis¬ 
patches. We were our own censors. 

That couldn’t be taken for granted, however, by 
G.H.Q. They were not sure at first of our mentality or 
our honor. The old tradition of distrust between the 
army and the rest was very strong until the New Army 
came into being, with officers who had not passed through 
Sandhurst but through the larger world. They were so 
nervous of us in those* early days that they appointed a 
staff of censors to live with us, travel with us, sleep with 
us, read our dispatches with a mass of rules for their 
guidance, and examine our private correspondence to our 
wives, if need be with acid tests, to discover any invisible 
message we might try to smuggle through. 

We had to suffer many humiliations in that way, but 
fortunately we had a sense of humor and laughed at most 
of them. Gradually also—very quickly indeed—we made 
friends with many generals and officers commanding divi¬ 
sions, brigades, and battalions, broke down their distrust, 
established confidence. They were surprised to find us 
decent fellows, and pleased with what we wrote about ' 
the men. They became keen to see us in their trenches 
or their headquarters. They wanted to show us their 
particular “peepshows,” they invited us to see special 

248 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

“stunts.” Their first hostility evaporated, and was re¬ 
placed by cordial welcome, and they laughed with us, 
and sometimes cursed with us, at the continued restric¬ 
tions of G.H.Q., which forbade the mention of battalions 
and brigades (well known to the enemy) whose heroic 
exploits we described. 

For some time G.H.Q., represented by General Mac- 
donagh. Chief of Intelligence, under whose orders we 
were, maintained a narrow view of our liberties in nar¬ 
ration and description. Hardly a week passed without 
some vexatious rule to cramp our style by prohibiting the 
mention of facts far better known to the Germans than 
to the British, whose men were suffering and dying with¬ 
out their own folk knowing the action in which their 
sacrifice was consummated. 

The heavy hand of the censorship fell with special 
weight upon us during the battle of Loos. General 
Macdonagh himself used the blue pencil ruthlessly, and 
I had no less than forty pages of manuscript deleted by 
his own hand from my descriptive account. Again it 
seemed to us that the guiding idea behind the censorship 
was, to conceal the truth not from the enemy, but from 
the nation, in defense of the British High Command and 
its tragic blundering. That was in September of 1915, 
and we became aware at that time that the man most 
hostile to our work was not Sir John French, the Com- 
mander-in-Chief, but Sir Douglas Haig, at that time in 
command of the First Corps. He drew a line around 
his own zone of operations beyond which we were for¬ 
bidden to go, and the message which conveyed his order 
to us was not couched in conciliatory language. It was 
withdrawn under the urgent pressure of our immediate 
chiefs, and I was allowed to go to the Loos redoubt dur¬ 
ing the progress of the battle, with John Buchan who 
had come out temporarily on behalf of The Times. 

The tragic slaughter at Loos, its reckless and useless 

249 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

waste of life, its abominable stall work, and certain 
political intrigues at home, led to the recall of Sir John 
French and the succession of Sir Douglas Haig as Com- 
mander-in-Chief. 

For a time we believed that our doom was sealed, 
knowing his strong prejudice against us, and in the first 
interview we had with him, he did not conceal his con¬ 
tempt for our job. But with his new responsibility he 
was bound to take notice of the increasing demand from 
the British government and people for more detailed 
accounts of British actions and of the daily routine of war. 
It became even an angry demand, and Sir Douglas Haig 
yielded to its insistence. From that time onward we were 
given full liberty of movement over the whole front, and 
full and complete privileges, never before accorded to 
war correspondents, to see the army reports during the 
progress of battle, and day by day; while Army Corps, 
Divisions, and Battalion headquarters were instructed to 
show us their intelligence and operation reports and to 
give us detailed information of any action on their part 
of the front. 

The new Chief of Intelligence, General Charteris, who 
succeeded General Macdonagh, devoted a considerable 
amount of time to our little unit, and in many ways, with 
occasional tightening of the reins, was broad-minded in 
his interpretation of the censorship regulations. It may 
be truly said that never before in history was a great war, 
or any war, so accurately and fully reported day by day 
for at least three years, subject to certain reservations 
which were abominably vexatious and tended to depress 
the spirit of the troops and to arouse the suspicion of the 
nation. 

The chief reservations were the ungenerous and unfair 
way in which the names of particular battalions were not 
allowed to be mentioned, and the suppression of the 
immense losses incurred by the troops. The last restric- 

250 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

tion was necessary. It would be disastrous in the course 
of a battle to give information to the enemy (who read 
all our newspapers) of the exact damage he had done at 
a particular part of the line. Nothing would be more 
valuable to an attacking army than that knowledge. In 
due course the losses became known to the nation by the 
publication of the casualty lists, so that it was only a 
temporary concealment. 

With regard to the mention of battalions, I am still 
convinced that there was needless secrecy in that respect, 
as nine times out of ten the German Intelligence was 
aware of what troops were in front of them, along all 
sectors. Scores of times, also, mention was made of the 
Canadians and Australians, where no reference was^per- 
mitted to English, Scottish, Irish, or Welsh battalions, 
so that the English especially, who from first to last 
formed sixty-eight per cent of the total fighting strength, 
and did most fighting and most dying, in all the great 
battles, were ignored in favor of their comrades from 
overseas. To this day many people in Canada and the 
United States believe that the Canadians bore the brunt 
of all the fighting, while Tommy Atkins looked on at a 
safe distance. The Australians have the same simple 
faith about their own crowd. But splendid beyond words 
as these men were, it is poor old Tommy Atkins of the 
English counties, and Jock, his Scottish cousin, who held 
the main length of the line, took most of the hard knocks, 
and fought most actions, big and little. Anybody who 
denies that is a liar. 

Our victory over the censorship, and over the narrow 
and unimaginative prejudice of elderly staff officers, was 
due in no small measure to—the censors. That may 
sound like a paradox, but it is the simple truth. I have 
already said that each correspondent had a censor at¬ 
tached to him, a kind of jailer and spy, eating, sleeping, 
walking, and driving. Blue pencil, in hand, they read 

251 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

our dispatches, slip by slip, as they were written, and our 
letters to our wives, our aunts, or our grandmothers. 
But these men happened to be gentlemen, and broad¬ 
minded men of the world, and they very quickly became 
our most loyal friends and active allies. 

They saw the absurdity of many of the regulations 
laid' down for their guidance in censoring our accounts, 
and they did their best to interpret them in a free and 
easy way, or to have thepi repealed, if there was no loop¬ 
hole of escape. Always they turned a blind eye, whenever 
possible, to a vexatious and niggling rule, and several of 
them risked their jobs, and lost them, in putting up a stiff 
resistance to some new and ridiculous order from G.H.Q. 
They went with us to the front, and shared our fatigues 
and our risks, and smoothed the way for us everywhere 
by tact and diplomacy and personal guarantees of our 
good sense and honor. 

The first group of censors who were attached to our 
little organization were as good as we could have wished 
if we had had a free choice of the whole British Army. 

Our immediate chief was a very noble and charming 
man. That was Colonel Stuart, a regular soldier of the 
old school, simple-hearted, brave as a lion, courteous and 
kind. He led us into many dirty places and tested our 
courage in front-line trenches, mine shafts, and bom¬ 
barded villages, with a smiling unconcern which at least 
taught us to hide any fear that lurked in our hearts, as 
I freely confess it very often did in mine. He was killed 
one day by a sniper’s bullet, and we mourned the loss of 
a very gallant gentleman. 

Attached to us, under his command, was an extraor¬ 
dinary fellow, and splendid type, famous in the two 
worlds of sport and letters by name of Hesketh Prichard. 
Many readers will know his name as the author of The 
Adventures of Don Q., Where Black Rules Whitey and 
other books. He was a big game hunter, a great cricketer, 

252 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

and an all-round sportsman, and he stood six foot four 
in his stockings, a long lean Irishman, with a powerful, 
deeply lined face, an immense nose, a whimsical mouth, 
and moody, restless, humorous, tragic eyes. He hated 
the war with a deadly loathing, because of its unceasing 
slaughter of that youth which he loved, his old comrades 
in the playing fields and his comrades’ sons. Often he 
would come down in the morning, when the casualty lists 
were long, with eyes red after secret weeping. He had a 
morbid desire to go to dangerous places and to get under 
fire, because he could not bear the thought of remaining 
alive and whole while his pals were dying. 

Often he would unwind his long legs, spring out of his 
chair, and say, “Gibbs, old boy, for God’s sake let’s go 
and have a prowl round Ypres, or see what’s doing 
Dickebush way.” There was always something doing 
in the way of high explosive shells, and once, when my 
friend Tomlinson and I were with Prichard in the ruin 
of the Grand Place in Ypres, a German aeroplane 
skimmed low above our heads and thought it worth while 
to bomb our little lonely group. Perhaps it was Hesketh’s 
G.H.Q. arm-band which caught the eye of the German 
aviator. We sprawled under the cover of ruined ma¬ 
sonry, and lay “doggo” until the bird had gone. But 
there was always the chance of death in every square yard 
of Ypres, because it was shelled ceaselessly, and that was 
why Hesketh went there with any companion who would 
join him—and his choice fell mostly on me. 

He left us before the battles of the Somme, to become 
chief sniper of the British army. With telescopic sights, 
and many tricks of Red Indian warfare, he lay in front¬ 
line trenches or camouflaged trees, and waited patiently, 
as in the old days he had lain waiting for wild beasts, 
until a German sniper showed his head to take a shot 
at one of our men. He never showed his head twice 
when Hesketh Prichard was within a thousand yards. 

253 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Then Prichard organized sniping schools all along the 
front, until we beat the Germans at their own game in 
that way of warfare. 

He survived the war, but not with his strength and 
activity. Some “bug” in the trenches had poisoned his 
blood, and when I saw him last he lay, a gaunt wreck, in 
the garden of his home near St. Albans, where his father- 
in-law was Earl of Verulam—Francis Bacon’s old title. 
In a letter he had written to me was the tragic phrase, 
^^Quantum mutatus ah —How changed from what 

once he was I—and as I looked at him, I was shocked at 
that change. The shadow of death was on him, though 
his beautiful wife tried to hide it from him, and from > 
herself, by a splendid laughing courage that masked her 
pity and fear. He was a victim of the war, though he 
lived until the peace. 

Another man who was attached to the war correspond¬ 
ent’s unit in that early part of the war was Colonel 
Faunthorpe, famous in India as a hunter of tigers—he 
had shot sixty-two in the jungle—and as a cavalry officer, 
pigsticker, judge, and poet. When, after the war, Faun¬ 
thorpe went for a time to the British Embassy in Wash¬ 
ington (making frequent visits to New York), American 
society welcomed him as the Englishman whom they had 
been taught to expect and had never yet seen. Here he 
was at last, as he is known in romance and legend—tall, 
handsome, inscrutable, with a monocle, a marvelous gift 
of silence, a quiet, deep, hardly revealed sense of humor, 
and a fine gallantry of manner to pretty women and ugly 
ones. He left a trail of tender recollection and humorous 
remembrance from New York to San Francisco. 

Faunthorpe, behind his mask of the typical cavalry 
officer, had (and has), as I quickly perceived, a subtle 
mind, a lively sense of irony, and a most liberal outlook 
on life. He had a quiet contempt (not always sufficiently 
disguised) for the limited intelligence of G.H.Q. (or of 

254 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

some high officers therein), he was open in his ridicule of 
journalists in general and some war correspondents in 
particular, and he regarded his own job in the war, as 
censor and controller of photographs, as one of the inex¬ 
plicable jests of fate. But he stood by us manfully in a 
time of crisis when, at the beginning of a series of battles, 
a venerable old gentleman, an “ancient” of prehistoric 
mind, was suddenly produced from some lair in G.H.Q., 
and given supreme authority over military censorship, 
which he instantly used by canceling all the privileges we 
had won by so much work and struggle. 

With the Colonel’s full consent, we went “on strike” 
and said the war could go on without us, as we would not 
write a single word about the impending battles until all 
the new restrictions were removed. This ultimatum 
shocked G.H.Q. to its foundations—or at least the Intel¬ 
ligence side of it. After twenty-four hours of obstinate 
command, the ancient one was sent back to his lair, our 
privileges were restored, but Colonel Faunthorpe was 
made the scapegoat of our rebellion, and deposed from 
his position as our chief. 

We deplored his departure, for he had been great and 
good to us. One quality of his was a check to our rest¬ 
lessness, nervousness, and irritability in the wear and tear 
of this strange life. He had an infinite reserve of pa¬ 
tience. When there was “nothing doing” he slept, be¬ 
lieving, as he said, in the “conservation of energy.” He 
slept always in the long motor drives which we made in 
our daily routine of inquiry and observation. He slept 
like a babe under shell fire, unless activity of command 
were required, and once awakened to find high explosive 
shells bursting around his closed car, which he had 
parked in the middle of a battlefield, while his driver 
was painfully endeavoring to hide his body behind a mud 
bank. . . . Colonel Faunthorpe is now “misgoverning 
the unfortunate Indians”—it is his own phrase—as Com- 

255 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

missioner at Lucknow, with command of life and death 
over millions of natives whom he understands as few men 
now alive. 

India was well represented in the group of censors 
attached to our organization, for we had two other Indian 
officials with us—Captains Reynolds and Coldstream, 
both men of high education, great charm of character, 
and unfailing sense of humor. For Reynolds I had a 
personal affection as a wise, friendly, and humorous soul, 
with whom I tramped in many strange places where death 
went ravaging, always encouraged by his cool disregard 
of danger, his smiling contempt for any show of fear. 

Coldstream was a little Pucklike man, neat as a new 
pin, damnably ironical of war and war correspondents, 
whimsical, courteous, sulky at times, like a spoiled boy, 
and lovable. He is back in India, like Reynolds and 
Faunthorpe, helping to govern our Empire, and doing it 
well. 

Our commanding officers and censors changed from 
time to time. It was a difficult and dangerous position 
to be O. C. war correspondents, for such a man was be¬ 
tween two fires—our own resentment (sometimes very 
passionate) of regulations hampering to our work, and 
the fright and anger of G.H.Q. if anything slipped 
through likely to create public criticism or to encourage 
the enemy, or to depress the spirit of the British people. 

Colonel Hutton Wilson, who was our immediate chief 
for a time, was a debonair little staff officer with the 
narrow traditions of the Staff College and an almost 
childlike ignorance of the press, the public, and human 
life outside the boundaries of his professional experience, 
which was not wide. He was amiable, but irritating to 
most of my colleagues, with little vexatious ways. Per¬ 
sonally I liked him, and I think he liked me, but he had 
a fixed idea that I was a rebel, and almost a Bolshevik. 

Later in the war he was succeeded by Colonel the 

256 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Honorable Neville Lytton, the grandson of Bulwer 
Lytton, the great novelist, and the brother of the present 
Lord Lytton. Neville Lytton was, and is, a man of 
great and varied talent, as painter, musician, and diplo¬ 
mat. In appearance as well as in character he belongs 
to the eightenth century, with a humorous, whimsical face, 
touched by side whiskers, and a most elegant way with 
him. He is a gentleman of the old school (with a 
strain of the gypsy in his blood), who believes in “form” 
above all things, and the heau geste in all situations of life 
or in the presence of death. When I walked with him 
one day up the old duckboards under shell fire, he swung 
his trench stick with careless grace, made comical grim¬ 
aces of contempt at the bursting shells, and said, “Gibbs, 
if we have to die, let’s do it like gentlemen I If we’re 
afraid (as we are I) let’s look extremely brave. A good 
pose is essential in life and war.” 

At the soul of him he was a Bohemian and artist. His 
room, wherever we were, was littered with sketches, 
sheets of music, poems in manuscript, photographs of his 
portraits of beautiful ladies. Whatever the agony of the 
war around us, he loved to steal away alone or with one 
of his assistant officers, my humorous friend Theodore 
Holland (“little Theo” and “Theo the Flower,” as he 
called himself), well known as a composer, and play 
delightful little melodies from Bach and Gluck on an 
eighteenth-century flute. 

In the early part of the war Lytton had served as a 
battalion officer in the trenches, with gallantry and dis¬ 
tinction, and then was put in charge of a little group of 
French correspondents, whom he controlled with won¬ 
derful tact and good humor. He spoke French with the 
argot of Paris, and understood the French tempera¬ 
ment and humor so perfectly that it was difficult to believe 
that he was not a Frenchman, when he was in the midst 
of his little crowd of excitable fellows who regarded him 

257 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

as a ^^hon garcorC* and ^*un original,^* with such real 
affection that they were enraged when he was transferred 
to our command. ^ 

Another distinguished and unusual type of man—one 
of the greatest “intellectuals” of England, though un¬ 
known to the general public—joined us as assistant cen¬ 
sor, halfway through the war. This was C. E. Montague, 
editor of The Manchester Guardian. At the outbreak 
of war he dyed his white hair black, enlisted as a 
“Tommy,” served in the trenches, reached the rank of 
sergeant, and finally was blown up in a dugout. When 
he joined us he had taken the dye out of his hair again 
and it was snow-white, though he was not more than 
fifty years of age. 

It was absurd for Montague to be censoring our dis¬ 
patches, ordering our cars, looking after our mess, 
soothing our way with headquarter staffs, accompanying 
us as a silent observer to battlefields and trenches and 
“pill-boxes” and dugouts. He could have written any 
man of us “off our heads.” He would have been the 
greatest war correspondent in the world. He writes such 
perfect prose that every sentence should be carved in 
marble or engraved on bronze. He had the eye of a 
hawk for small detail, and a most sensitive perception 
of truth and beauty lying deep below the surface of our 
human scene. Compared with Montague our censor— 
hating his job, deeply contemptuous of our work, loath¬ 
ing the futility of all but the fighting men, with a secret 
revolt in his soul against the whole bloody business of 
war, yet with a cold white passion of patriotism (though 
Irish)—we were pigmies, vulgarians, and shameless 
souls. His bitterness has been revealed in a book called 
Disenchantment —very cruel to us, rather unfair to me, 
as he admits in a letter I have, but wonderful in its truth. 

There was one other man who joined our organization 
as one of the censors, to whom I must pay a tribute of 

258 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

affection and esteem. This was a young fellow named 
Cadge, unknown to fame, always silent and sulky in his 
manner, but with a level head, a genius for doing exactly 
the right thing at the right time, and a secret sweetness 
and nobility of soul which kept our little “show” running 
on greased wheels and made him my good comrade in 
many adventures. Scores of time he and I went together 
into the dirty places, into the midst of the muck and ruin 
of war, across the fields where shells came whining, along 
the trenches where masses of men lived in the mud, under 
the menace of death. 

A strange life—like a distant dream now!—^but made 
tolerable at times, because of these men whose portraits 
I have sketched, and whose friendship was good to have. 


259 


t 


XX 

T he four and a half years of war were, of course, 
to me, as to all men who passed through that time, 
the most stupendous experience of life. It obliterated all 
other adventures, impressions, and achievements. I went 
into the war youthful in ideas and sentiment. I came out 
of it old in the knowledge of human courage and endur¬ 
ance and suffering by masses of men, and utterly changed, 
physically and mentally. Romance had given way to real¬ 
ism, sentiment of a weak kind to deeper knowledge and 
pity and emotion. 

Our life as war correspondents was not to be com¬ 
pared for a moment in hardness and danger and dis¬ 
comfort to that of the fighting men in the trenches. Yet 
it was not easy nor soft, and it put a tremendous, and 
sometimes almost intolerable, strain upon our nerves and 
strength, especially if we were sensitive, as most of us 
were, to the constant sight of wounded and dying men, to 
the never-ending slaughter of our country’s youth, to the 
grim horror of preparations for battle which we knew 
would cause another river of blood to flow, and to the 
desolation of that world of ruin through which we passed 
day by day, on the battlefields and in the rubbish heaps 
which had once been towns and villages. 

We saw, more than most men the wide sweep of the 
drama of war on the Western front. The private soldier 
and the battalion officer saw the particular spot which he 
had to defend, knew in his body and soul the intimate 
detail of his trench, his dugout, the patch of No-Man’s 
Land beyond his parapet, the stink and filth of his own 
neighborhood with death, the agony of his wounded pals. 





ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

But we saw the war in a broader vision, on all parts of 
the front, in its tremendous mass effects, as well as in 
particular places of abomination. Before battle we saw 
the whole organization of that great machine of slaughter. 
After battle we saw the fields of dead, the spate of 
wounded men, the swirling traffic of ambulances, the 
crowded hospitals, the herds of prisoners, the length and 
breadth of this frightful melodrama in a battle zone 
forty miles or more in length and twenty miles or more 
in depth. 

The effect of such a vision, year in, year out, can 
hardly be calculated in psychological effect, unless a man 
has a mind like a sieve and a soul like a sink. 

Our headquarters were halfway between the front and 
G.H.Q., and we were visitors of both worlds. In our 
chateau, wherever we might be—and we shifted our 
locality according to the drift of battle—we were secluded 
and remote from both these worlds. But we set out 
constantly to the front—every day in time of active war¬ 
fare—through Ypres, if Flanders was aflame, or through 
Arras, if that were the focal point, or out from Amiens to 
Bapaume and beyond, where the Somme was the hunting 
ground, or up by St. Quentin to the right of the line. 
There was no part of the front we did not know, and 
not a ruined village in all the fighting zone through which 
we did not pass scores of times, or hundreds of times. 

We trudged through the trenches, sat in dugouts with 
battalion officers, followed our troops in their advance 
over German lines, explored the enemy dugouts, talked 
with German prisoners as they tramped back after cap¬ 
ture or stood in herds of misery in their “cages,” walked 
through miles of guns, and beyond the guns, saw the 
whole sweep and fury of great bombardments, took our 
chance of harassing fire and sudden “strafes,” climbed into 
observation posts, saw attacks and counterattacks, be¬ 
came familiar with the detail of the daily routine of war- 

261 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

fare on the grand scale, such as, in my belief, the world 
will never see again. 

We were visitors, also, to the other world—the world 
behind the lines, in G.H.Q., in Army Corps and Divi¬ 
sional Headquarters, in training schools and camps, and 
casualty clearing stations and billets in the “rest” areas, 
remote from the noise and filth of battle. From the 
private soldier standing by a slimy parapet to the Com- 
mander-in-Chief in his comfortable chateau, we studied 
all the psychological strata of the British armies in 
France, as few other men had the chance of doing. 

But all the time we were between two worlds, and be¬ 
longed to neither, and though I think our job was worth 
doing (and the spirit of the people would have broken 
if we had not done it) we felt at times (or I did) that 
the only honest job was to join the fighting men and die 
like the best of British manhood did. Our risks were not 
enough to make us honest when so many were being killed, 
though often we had the chance of death. So it seemed 
to me, often, then; so it seems to me, sometimes, now. 

We had wonderful facilities for our work. Each man 
had a motor car, which gave him complete mobility. On 
days of battle we five drew lots as to the area we would 
cover, and with one of the censors, who were, as I have 
said, our best comrades, set out to the farthest point at 
which we could leave a car without having it blown to 
bits. Then often we walked, to get a view of the battle¬ 
field, amid the roar of our own guns, and in the litter of 
newly captured ground. We got as far as possible into 
the traffic of supporting troops, advancing guns, meeting 
the long straggling processions of “walking wounded,” 
bloody and bandaged prisoners, stepping over the mangled 
bodies of men, watching the fury of shell fire from our 
own massed artillery, and the enemy’s barrage fire. 

Then we had to call at Corps Headquarters—our daily 
routine—for the latest reports, and after many hours, 

262 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

motor back again to our own place to write fast and 
furiously. Dispatch riders took our messages (censored 
by the men who had been out with us that day) back to 
“Signals” at G.H.Q., from which they were telephoned 
back to the War Office in London, who transmitted them 
to the newspapers. 

The War Office had no right of censorship, and our 
dispatches were untouched after they had left our quar¬ 
ters. Nor were our newspapers allowed to alter or sup¬ 
press any word we wrote. 

It may surprise many people to know that we were 
not in the employ of our own newspapers. The dispatches 
of the five men on the Western front (apart from special 
Canadian and Australian correspondents attached to 
their own Corps) were distributed by arrangement with 
the War Office to all countries within the Empire, under 
the direction of an organization known as The News¬ 
paper Proprietors Association, who shared our expenses. 

From first to last we were read, greedily and atten¬ 
tively by millions of readers, but I tell the painful truth 
when I say that many of them were suspicious of our 
accounts and firmly believed that we concealed much more 
than we told. That distrust was due, partly, to the heavy- 
handed censorship in the early days of the war, when our 
first accounts were mutilated. Afterward, when the cen¬ 
sorship was very light so that nothing was deleted except 
very technical detail and, too often, the names of bat¬ 
talions, that early suspicion lasted. 

During long spells of trench warfare, without any great 
battles but with steady and heavy casualties, the British 
public suspected that we were hiding enormous events. 
They could not believe that so many men could be killed 
unless big actions were in progress. Also, when great 
battles had been fought, and we had recorded many gains, 
in prisoners and guns, and trench positions, the lack of 
decisive result seemed to give the lie to our optimism. 

263 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Again, the cheerful way in which one or two of the 
correspondents wrote, as though a battle was a kind of 
glorified football match, exasperated the troops who 
knew their own losses, and the public who agonized over 
that great sum of death and mutilation. 

Personally, I cannot convict myself of overcheerful¬ 
ness or the minimizing of the tragic side of war, for, by 
temperament as well as by intellectual conviction, I wrote 
always with heavy stress on the suffering and tragedy of 
warfare, though I coerced my soul to maintain the 
spiritual courage of the nation and the fighting men— 
sometimes when my own spirit was dark with despair. 

To our mess, between the two worlds, came visitors 
from both. It was our special pleasure to give a lift in 
one of our Vauxhalls to some young officer of the fighting 
line and bring him to our little old chateau or one of our 
billets behind the lines and help him to forget the filth 
and discomfort of trenches and dugouts by a good dinner 
in a good room. They were grateful for that, and we 
had many friends in the infantry, cavalry, Tank corps, 
machine guns, field artillery and “heavies” to whom we 
gave this hospitality. 

When Neville Lytton became our chief, we even rose 
to the height of having a military band to play to our 
guests after dinner on certain memorable nights, and I 
remember a little French interpreter, himself a fine 
musician, who, on one of those evenings when our salon 
was crowded with officers tapping heel and toe to the 
music, raised his hands in ecstasy and said, “This is like 
one of the wars of the eighteenth century when slaughter 
did not prevent elegance and the courtesies of life.” 

But in the morning there was the same old routine of 
setting out for the stricken fields, the same old vision of 
mangled men streaming back from battle, prisoners hud¬ 
dled like tired beasts, and shell fire ravaging the enemy’s 
line, and ours. 


264 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Army, Corps, and Divisional Generals, occasionally 
some tremendous man from G.H.Q., like our supreme 
chief. General Charteris, favored us with their company, 
and discussed every aspect of the war with us without 
reserve. Their old hostility had utterly disappeared, 
their old suspicion was gone, and for three years we pos¬ 
sessed their confidence and their friendship. 

In a book of mine—“Realities of War,” published in 
the United States under the title of “Now It Can Be Told” 
—I have been a critic of the Staff, and have said some 
hard and cruel things about the blundering and inefficiency 
of its system. But for many of the Generals and Staff 
officers in their personal character I had nothing but ad¬ 
miration and esteem. Their courage and devotion to 
duty, their patriotism and honor, were beyond criticism, 
and they were gentlemen of the good old school, with, 
for the most part, a simplicity of mind and manner which 
doesn’t, perhaps, belong to our present time. Yet I could 
not help thinking, as I still think, that those elderly 
gentlemen who had been trained in the South-African 
school of warfare, had been confronted with problems 
in another kind of war which were beyond their imagina¬ 
tion and range of thought or experience. Even that ver¬ 
dict, however, which is true, I believe, of the High 
Command, must be modified in favor of men who cre¬ 
ated a New Army, marvelously perfect as a machine. 
Our artillery, our transport, our medical service, our 
training, were highly efficient, as the Germans themselves 
admitted. The machine was as good as an English- 
built engine, and marvelous when one takes into ac¬ 
count its rapid and enormous growth in an untrained 
nation. It was in the handling of the machine that 
criticism finds an open field—and it’s an easy game, 
anyhow I 

Apart from Generals, staff officers, and battalion 
officers who came to our mess, there were other visitors, 

265 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

now and then, from that remote world which had been 
ours before the war—the civilian world of England. 

During the latter part of the war all sorts of strange 
people were invited out for a three-days’ tour behind the 
lines, with a glimpse or two of the battlefields, in the 
belief that they would go back as propagandists for re¬ 
newed effort and strength of purpose and “the will to 
win.” A guest house was established near G.H.Q., to 
which were invited politicians, labor leaders, distinguished 
writers, bishops, and representatives of neutral countries. 

In their three-days’ visit they did not see very much of 
“the real thing,” but enough to show them the wonderful 
spirit of the fighting men and the enormous organization 
required for their support, and the unbroken strength of 
the enemy. Now and then these visitors to the guest 
house came over to our mess, more interested to meet us, 
I think, than Generals and officers at the Base, because 
they could get from us, in a more intimate way, the 
truth about the war and its progress. 

Among those apparitions from civil life, I remember, 
particularly, Bernard Shaw, because it was due to a freak¬ 
ish suggestion of mine that he had been invited out. It 
seemed to me that Shaw, of all men, would be useful for 
propaganda, if the genius of his pen were inspired by the 
valor and endurance of our fighting men. Anyhow, he 
would, I thought, tell the truth about the things he saw, 
with deeper perception of its meaning than any other 
living writer. 

Bernard Shaw, in a rough suit of Irish homespun, and 
with his beard dank in the wet mist of Flanders, appeared 
suddenly to my friend Tomlinson as a ghost from the pre¬ 
war past. His first words were in the nature of a knock¬ 
out blow. 

“Hullo, Tomlinson! Are all war correspondents such 
bloody fools as they make themselves out to be?” 

The answer was in the negative, but could not avoid 

266 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

an admission, like the answer yes or no to that legal trick 
of questioning: “Have you given up beating your wife?” 

Bernard Shaw was invited, by suggestion amounting 
to orders from G.H.Q., to lunch with various Generals 
at their headquarters. I accompanied him two or three 
times, and could not help remarking the immense dis¬ 
tinction of his appearance and manners in the company 
of those simple soldiers. Intellectually, of course, he 
was head and shoulders above them, and he could not 
resist shocking them, now and then, by his audacity of 
humor. 

So it was when an old General who had sat somewhat 
silent in his preser ce (resentful that this “wild Irishman” 
should have been thrust upon his mess) enquired mildly 
how long he thought the war would last. 

“Well, General,” said Shaw, with a twinkle in his eye, 
“we’re all anxious for an early and dishonorable peace!” 

The General’s cheeks were slightly empurpled, and he 
was silent, wondering what he could make of this treason¬ 
able utterance, but there was a loud yelp of laughter from 
his A.D.C.’s at the other end of the table. 

Before entering the city of Arras, in which shells 
were falling intermittently, Shaw, whose plays and books 
had had a great vogue in Germany, remarked with sham 
pathos, “Well, if the Germans kill me to-day, they will 
be a most ungrateful people!” 

I accompanied him on various trips he made—there was 
“nothing doing” on the front just then, and he did not 
see the real business of war—and in conversation with 
him was convinced of the high-souled loyalty of the man 
to the Allied Cause. His sense of humor was only a 
playful mask, and though he was a Pacifist in general 
principles, he realized that the only course possible after 
the declaration of war was to throw all the energy of 
the nation into the bloody struggle, which must be one 
of life or death to the British race. 

267 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

‘‘There is no need of censorship,” he told me; “while 
the war lasts we must be our own censors. All one’s 
ideas of the war are divided into two planes of thought 
which never meet. One plane deals with the folly and 
wickedness of war. The other plane is the immediate 
necessity of beating the Boche.” 

He has surprising technical knowledge of aviation, and 
talked with our young aviators on equal terms regarding 
the science of flight. He was also keenly interested in 
artillery work. Unfortunately his articles, written as a 
result of his visit, were not very successful, and the very 
title, “Joy-riding at the Front,” offended many people 
who would not tolerate levity regarding a war whose black 
tragedy darkened all their spirit. 

Sir J. M. Barrie was another brief visitant. He dined 
at our mess one night, intensely shy, ill-at-ease until our 
welcome reassured him, and painfully silent. Only one 
gleam of the real Barrie appeared. It was when one of 
my colleagues asked him to write something in the visitors’ 
book. He thought gloomily for a moment, and then 
wrote: ^^Beware of a dark woman with a hig appetite” 
The meaning of this has kept us guessing ever since. 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a great sensation 
along the roads of Flanders when he appeared for a few 
days, not because the troops recognized him as the writer 
of Sherlock Holmes and other favorite books, but be¬ 
cause he looked more important than the Commander- 
in-Chief, and more military than a Field Marshal. He 
wore the uniform of a County Lieutenant, with a “brass 
hat,” so heavy with gold lace, and epaulettes so re¬ 
splendent, that even Colonels and Brigadiers saluted him 
as he passed. 

John Masefield was more than a three-days’ guest. 
After his beautiful book “Gallipoli,” he was asked to 
study the Somme battlefields from which the enemy had 
then retreated, and to write an epic story of those trc- 

268 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

mendous battles in which the New Armies had fought the 
enemy yard by yard, trench by trench, wood by wood, 
ridge by ridge, through twenty miles deep of earthworks, 
until, after enormous slaughter on both sides, the enemy’s 
resistance had been broken. 

Masefield arrived late on the scene, and was only able 
to study the ground after the line of battle had moved 
forward, and to get the stories of the survivors. I had 
had the advantage of him there, as an eyewitness of the 
tremendous struggle in all its phases and over all that 
ground. When I republished my daily narrative in book 
form under the title of “The Battles of the Somme,” 
Masefield abandoned his plan, and so deprived English 
literature of what I am certain would have been a death¬ 
less work. All he published was an introduction, which 
he called “The Old Front Line,” in which, with most 
beautiful vision, he described the geographical aspects of 
that ground on which the flower of our British youth fell 
in six weeks of ceaseless and terrible effort. 

I met Masefield at that time. He was billeted at 
Amiens with Lytton’s wild team of foreign correspond¬ 
ents. They were all talking French, arguing, quarreling, 
gesticulating, noisily and passionately, and Masefield sat 
silent among them, with a look of misery and long 
suffering. 

The most important visitor from the outside world 
whom we had in our own mess was Lloyd George, then 
Minister for War. He came with Lord Reading, the 
Lord Chief Justice of England. Like most other visitors, 
they did not get very far into the zone of fire, and it 
would, of course, have been absurd to take Lloyd George 
into dangerous places where he might have lost his life. 
He did, however, get within reach of long-range shells, 
and I remember seeing him emerge from an old German 
dugout wearing a “tin hat” above his somewhat exuberant 
white locks. Some Tommies standing near remarked his 

269 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

somewhat unusual appearance. “Who’s that bloke?” 
asked one of them. 

“Blimy I” said the other. “It looks like the Archbishop 
of Canterbury.” 

The visit of Lloyd George was regarded with some 
suspicion by the High Command. “He’s up to some 
mischief, I’ll be bound,” said one of our Generals in my 
hearing. It was rumored that his relations with Sir 
Douglas Haig were not very cordial, and I was per¬ 
sonally aware, after a breakfast meal in Downing Street, 
that Lloyd George had no great admiration of British 
Generalship. But it was amusing to see how quickly he 
captured them all by his geniality, quickness of wit, and 
nimble intelligence, and by the apparent simplicity in his 
babe-blue eyes. Officers who had alluded to him as “the 
damned little Welshman,” were clicking heels and trying 
to get within the orbit of his conversation. 

He was particularly friendly and complimentary to the 
war correspondents. I think he felt more at ease with 
us, and was, I think, genuinely appreciative of our work. 
Anyhow, he went out of his way to pay a particular com¬ 
pliment to me when, in 1917, Robert Donald of The 
Daily Chronicle, was kind enough to give a dinner in my 
honor. The Prime Minister attended the dinner, with 
General Smuts, and made a speech in which he said many 
generous things about my work. It was the greatest 
honor ever given to a Fleet-Street man, and I was glad 
of it, not only for my own sake, but because it was a 
tribute to the work of the war correspondents—handi¬ 
capped as they were by many restrictions, and by general 
distrust. 

I had an opportunity that night of saying things I 
wanted to say to the Prime Minister and his colleagues, 
and the memory of the men in the trenches, and of the 
wounded, gassed, and blinded men crawling down to the 
field hospitals, gave me courage and some gift of words. 

.270 


I 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

... I do not regret the things I said, and their emo¬ 
tional effect upon the Prime Minister. 

At that time, I confess, I did not see any quick or 
definite ending to the war. After the frightful battles 
in Flanders of 1917, with'their colossal sum of slaughter 
on both sides, the enemy was still in great strength. 
Russia had broken, and it was inevitable that masses of 
German troops, liberated from that front, would be 
brought against us. America was still unready and un¬ 
trained, though preparing mighty legions. 

There was another year for the war correspondents to 
record day by day, with as much hope as they could 
muster, when in March of T8 our line was broken for 
a time by the tremendous weight of the last German 
attack, and with increasing exaltation and enormous joy 
when at last the tide turned and the enemy was on the 
run and the end was in sight. 

That last year crammed into its history the whole 
range of human emotion, and as humble chroniclers the 
small body of war correspondents partook of the anguish 
and the exaltation of the troops who marched at last to 
the Rhine. 

The coming of the Americans, the genius of Foch in 
supreme command, the immortal valor of the British and 
French troops, first in retreat and then in advance, the 
liberation of many great cities, the smashing of the Ger¬ 
man war machine, and the great surrender, make that last 
year of the war unforgetable in history. I have told it 
all in detail elsewhere. Here I am only concerned with 
the work of the war correspondents, and the supreme 
experience I had in journalistic adventure. 

On the whole we may claim, I think, that our job was 
worth doing, and not badly done. Some of us, at least, 
did not spare ourselves to learn the truth and tell it as 
far as it lay in our vision and in our power of words. 
During the course of the battles it was not possible to tell 

271 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

all the truth, to reveal the full measure of slaughter on 
our side, and we had no right of criticism. But day by 
day the English-speaking world was brought close in 
spiritual touch with their fighting men, and knew the best, 
if not the worst, of what was happening in the field of 
war, and the daily record of courage, endurance, achieve¬ 
ment, by the youth that was being spent with such prodigal 
' unthrifty zeal. 

I verily believe that without our chronicles the spirit 
of the nation would not have maintained its greatness 
of endeavor and sacrifice. There are some who hold that 
to be the worst accusation against us. They charge us 
with having bolstered up the spirit of hatred and made a 
quicker and a better peace impossible. I do not plead 
guilty to that, for, from first to last no word of hate 
slipped into my narrative, and my pictures of war did 
not hide the agony of reality nor the price of victory. 


272 


XXI 


T he coming of Peace, after four and a half years of 
a world in conflict, was as great a strain to the 
civilized mind as the outbreak of war. Indeed, I think 
it was more tragic in its effect upon the mentality and 
moral character of the peoples who had been strained 
to the uttermost. 

The sudden relaxation left them limp, purposeless, and 
unstrung. A sense of the ghastly futility of the horrible 
massacre in Europe overwhelmed multitudes of men and 
women who had exerted the last vibration of spiritual 
energy for the sake of victory, now that all was over, 
and the cost was counted. The loss of the men they had 
loved seemed light and tolerable to the soul while the 
struggle continued and the spirit of sacrifice was still at 
fever heat, but in the coldness which settled upon the 
world after that fever was spent, and in homes which 
returned to normal ways of life, after the home-com¬ 
ing of the Armies, the absence of the breadwinner or 
the unforgotten son, was felt with a sharper and more 
dreadful anguish. A great sadness and spirit of dis¬ 
illusion overwhelmed the nations which had been victo¬ 
rious, even more than those defeated. What was 
this victory? What was its worth, with such visible 
tracks of ruin and death in all nations exhausted by the 
struggle ? 

As a journalist again, back to Fleet Street, in civil 
clothes, which felt strange after khaki and Sam Brown 
belts, I found that my new little assignment in life was 
to study the effects of the war which I had helped to 

273 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

record, and to analyze the character and state of 
European peoples, including my own, as they had been 
changed by that tremendous upheaval. 

Fleet Street itself had changed during the war. In 
spite of the severity of the censorship under the Defense 
of the Realm Act, and the almost slavish obedience of 
the press to its dictates, the newspaper proprietors had 
risen in social rank and power, and newspaper offices 
which had once been the shabby tenements of social out¬ 
casts—the inhabitants of “Grub Street”—were now 
strewn with coronets and the insignia of nobility. Fleet 
Street had not only become respectable. It had become 
the highway to the House of Lords. 

The Harmsworth family had become ennobled to all 
but the highest grade in the peerage, this side of Duke¬ 
dom. As chief propagandist, the man I had first met as 
Sir Alfred Harmsworth (when General Booth forced 
me to my knees and prayed for him!) was now Viscount, 
with his brother Harold as Lord Rothermere. He as¬ 
pired to the dictatorship of England through the power 
of the press, and, but for one slight miscalculation, would 
have been dictator. 

That miscalculation was the growing disbelief of the 
British public in anything they read in the press. The 
false accounts of air raids (when the public knew the 
truth of their own losses), such incidents as the press 
campaign against Kitchener, and that ridiculous over-opti¬ 
mism, the wildly false assurances of military writers (I was 
not one of them) when things were going worst in the 
war, had undermined the faith of the nation in the hon¬ 
esty of their newspapers. Nevertheless, the power of 
men like Northcliffe was enormous in the political sphere, 
and Cabinet Ministers and members of Parliament ac¬ 
knowledged their claims. 

Burnham of The Telegraph was now a Viscount, but, 
unlike Lord Northcliffe, he supported whatever govern- 

274 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

ment was In power and had no personal vendetta against 
politicians or policies. 

Max Altken, once a company promoter In Canada, and 
now proprietor of The Daily Expressy became Lord 
Beaverbrook as his reward for the part he played in 
unseating Asquith and bringing In Lloyd George. An¬ 
other peer was Lord Riddell, owner of the “News of the 
World,” which Is not generally regarded as a spiritual 
light In the land. As one of the most Intimate friends of 
Lloyd George, he merited the reward of loyalty. Not 
only peerages, but baronetcies and knighthoods were scat¬ 
tered In Fleet Street and Its tributaries by a Prime Minis¬ 
ter who understood the power of the press, but, in spite 
of a free distribution of titles, did not possess its loyalty 
when the tide of public favor turned from him. 

The five war correspondents on the Western front— 
Perry Robinson, Beach Thomas, Percival Phillips, 
Herbert Russell, and myself—received knighthood from 
the King, at the recommendation of the War Office. I 
had been offered that honor before the war came to an 
end, but it was opposed by some of the newspaper pro¬ 
prietors who said that if I were knighted the other men 
ought also to receive this title—a perfectly fair protest. 
I was not covetous of that knighthood, and indeed shrank 
from It so much that I entered Into a compact with Beach 
Thomas to refuse It. But things had gone too far, and 
we could not reject the title with any decency. So one 
fine morning, when a military Investiture was In progress, 
I went up to Buckingham Palace, knelt before the King 
in the courtyard there, with a top hat In my hand, and 
my knee getting cramped on a velvet cushion, while he 
gave me the accolade, put the insignia of the K.B.E. 
round my neck, fastened a star over my left side, and 
spoke a few generous words. I should be wholly insincere 
if I pretended that at that moment I did not feel the stir 
of the old romantic sentiment with which I had been 

275 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

steeped as a boy, and a sense of pride that I had “won 
my spurs” in service for England’s sake. Yet, as I walked 
home with my box of trinkets and that King’s touch on 
my shoulder, I thought of the youth who had served 
England with greater gallantry, through hardship and 
suffering to sudden death or to the inevitable forgetful¬ 
ness of a poverty-stricken peace. 

That knighthood of mine deeply offended one of my 
friends, whose good opinion I valued more than that of 
most others. This man, who had been in the ugly places 
with me, could hardly pardon this acceptance of a title 
which seemed to him a betrayal of democratic faith and 
an allegiance to those whom he regarded as part authors 
of the war, traitors to the men who died, perpetrators of 
hate, architects of an infamous peace, and profiteers of 
their nation’s ruin. A harsh judgment! The only dif¬ 
ference I find that knighthood has made to my outlook 
on life is the knowledge of a slight increase in my trades¬ 
men’s bills. 

One change in the editorial side of Fleet Street affected 
me in a personal way, and was a revelation of the anxiety 
of the Coalition Government to capture the press in its 
own interests. Robert Donald, under whose Directorship 
I had served on The Daily Chronicle for many years— 
with occasional lapses as a free lance—had been a close 
personal friend of Lloyd George, but toward the end of 
the war permitted himself some liberty of criticism— 
very mild in its character—against the Prime Minister. 
It was his undoing. Lloyd George was already under the 
fire of the Northcliffe press which had helped to raise 
him to the Premiership and now tired of him, for personal 
reasons by Lord Northcliffe, and he foresaw the time 
when, after the war, he would need all the support he 
could get from the press machine. A group of his 
friends, including Sir Henry Dalziel (afterward pro¬ 
moted to the peerage) and Sir Charles Sykes, a rich 

276 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

manufacturer, approached the Lloyds, who owned The 
Daily Chronicle, and bought that paper and Lloyds 
Weekly News for over £1,000,000. Robert Donald 
found it sold over his head, without warning, and felt 
himself obliged to resign his editorship. Ernest Perris, 
the former news editor, who had managed that depart¬ 
ment with remarkable ability, reigned in his stead, and 
The Daily Chronicle became the official organ, the de¬ 
fender through thick and thin, fair and foul, of Lloyd 
George and his Coalition. 

A series of dramatic telegrams reached me at the front, 
but I paid very little heed to them and failed to under¬ 
stand the inner significance of this affair. But in loyalty 
to Robert Donald, and by his advice, I signed a contract 
with The Daily Telegraph. It made no difference to my 
readers, as my articles continued to appear in The Daily 
Chronicle, as well as in The Telegraph, as they had done 
throughout the war, by arrangement of the Newspaper 
Proprietors Association and the War Office. 

Nominally Lord Burnham was my chief instead of 
Robert Donald. I liked him thoroughly, as he had always 
been particularly kind to me, especially on a night when 
I was deeply humiliated by one of those social faux pas 
which hurt a man more than the guilty knowledge of a 
secret crime. 

This was during the war, when I arrived home on 
leave to find a card inviting me to dine with Lord Burn¬ 
ham at the Garrick Club. I had often dined at the 
Garrick with my brother, who was a member of the club, 
and remembered that evening clothes had not been worn 
by most of the men there. Anyhow, I arrived from a 
country journey in an ordinary lounge suit, with rather 
muddy boots, owing to a downpour of rain, and then 
found, to my consternation, that I was the guest of a 
distinguished dinner party assembled in my honor. The 
first man to whom I was presented was Field Marshal 

277 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial Staff, and 
behind him stood Admiral Lord Charles Beresford (old 
“Charlie B.”) and a number of important people who 
were helping to “win the war.” Lord Burnham entirely 
disregarded my miserable clothes, but I was damnably 
uncomfortable until I forgot my own insignificance in 
listening to the conversation of these great people who 
were as gloomy and pessimistic a crowd as I have ever 
met, and seemed to have abandoned all hope. The one 
exception was Sir William Robertson, who sat rather 
silent until at the end of the meal he said “We may be 
puffed, and breathing hard, but all I can say is, gentle¬ 
men, that the Germans are more exhausted.” 

That reminiscence, however, only leads me to the fact 
that after the Armistice I again transferred to The Daily 
Chronicle and remained with them until Lloyd George’s 
policy of reprisals in Ireland filled me with a sudden 
passion of disgust and led to my resignation from the 
paper which supported it. 

I think every journalist must now admit that the Eng¬ 
lish press, with very few exceptions, fell to a very low 
moral ebb after the Armistice. The “hate” campaign 
was not relinquished but revived with full blast against 
the beaten enemy. A mountain of false illusion was built 
up on the basis that Germany could be made to pay for 
all the costs of war in all the victorious nations, and a 
peace of vengeance was encouraged, full of the seeds of 
future wars, at a time in the history of mankind when by 
a little spirit of generosity, a little drawing together of 
the world’s democracies, even a little economic sanity in 
regard to the ruined state of Europe as a whole, civiliza¬ 
tion itself might have been lifted to a higher plane, future 
peace might have been secured according to the promise 
of “the war to end war,” and at least we should have 
been spared the squalor, the degradation, the bitterness 
of the last four years. But the English press led the 

278 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

chorus of “Hang the Kaiser,” “Make the Germans pay,” 
“They will cheat you yet, those Junkers!” and all the old 
cries of passionate folly, instead of concentrating on the 
defeat of militarism now that Germany was down and 
out, the economic reconstruction of Europe after the ruin 
of war, and the fulfilment of the pledges that had been 
made to the men who won the war. For, as we now 
know, and as I foretold, the German people could not 
pay these colossal, unimaginable sums upon which France 
and Great Britain reckoned, and the whole argument of 
these “fruits of victory” was built upon a falsity which 
demoralized the peoples of the allied Powers, and kept 
Europe in a ferment. The English press (apart from a 
few papers) refused to bear witness to the real truth, 
which was that the Peace of Versailles was impossible of 
fulfillment, that Europe could not recover under its eco¬ 
nomic provisions, and that the victor nations would have 
to face poverty, an immense burden of taxation, a stagna¬ 
tion of trade, the awful costs of war, with no chance of 
getting rich again by putting a stranglehold on the de¬ 
feated peoples. 

For four years following the Armistice I become a 
wanderer in Europe, Asia Minor, and America, as a 
student of the psychology and state of this after-war 
world, trying to see beneath the surface of social and 
political life to the deeper currents of thought and emo¬ 
tion and natural law set in motion by the enormous 
tragedy through which so many nations had passed. 

Everywhere I saw a loosening of the old restraints of 
mental and moral discipline and a kind of neurotic malady 
which was manifested by alternate gusts of gayety and 
depression, a wild licentiousness in the crowded cities of 
Europe, a spirit of restlessness and revolt among the 
demobilized men, and misery, starvation, disease, and 
despair, beyond the glare and glitter of dancing halls, 
restaurants, and places of frivolity. 

279 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

In France the exultation of victory, which inspired a 
spirit of carnival in the boulevards of Paris, crowded 
with visitors from all the Allied nations, did not uplift 
the hearts of masses of peasants and humble bourgeois 
folk who returned to the sites of their old homes and 
villages of which only a few stones or sticks or rubbish 
heaps remained in the fields which had been swept by the 
flame of war. With courage and resignation they cleared 
the ground of barbed wire and unexploded shells, and 
the unburied bodies of men, and the foul litter of a four 
years’ battle, but they faced a bleak prospect, and behind 
them and around them was the vision of ruin and death. 
For a long time they were without water or light, stone 
or timber, for the work of reconstruction, or any recom- 
pense for their losses from the French Government 
which looked to Germany for reparations and did not get 
them. I talked with many of these people in their hovels 
and huts, marveled at their patience and courage and 
was saddened because so quickly after war they mis¬ 
trusted the friendship of England, and the security of 
the peace they had gained. Their hatred to the Germans 
was a cold, undying fire, and beneath their hatred was 
the fear, already visible, that Germany hadn’t been 
smashed enough, and that one day she would come back 
again for vengeance. 

In Italy there was violence, bitterness, poverty, and 
revolt. The nation was demoralized by all the shocks 
that had shaken it. The microbe of Bolshevism was 
working in the brains of demoralized soldiers. The very 
walls of Rome were scrawled with Communistic cries and 
the name of Lenin. 

In Rome I accomplished a journalistic mission which, 
in its way, was a unique honor and experience. This was 
to interview the Pope on behalf of The Daily Chronicle 
and a syndicate of American newspapers. Such a thing 
seemed impossible, and I knew that the chances against 

280 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

me were a million to one. Yet I believed that some plain 
words from the Pope who, perhaps, alone among men 
had been above and outside all the fratricidal strife of na¬ 
tions, and had been abused by both sides as “Pro-German” 
and “Pro-Ally,” would be of profound interest and impor¬ 
tance. It was possible that he might give a spiritual call 
to humanity in this time of moral depression and degra¬ 
dation. I pressed these views upon a certain prelate who 
had the confidence of Benedict XV, and who was a broad¬ 
minded man in sympathy with democratic thought and 
customs. 

He laughed at me heartily for my audacity, and said, 
“Out of the question I . . . Impossible!” He explained 
that no journalists were allowed even at the public 
audiences of the Pope, owing to regrettable incidents, and 
that my request for a private interview couldn’t be con¬ 
sidered. . . . We talked of international affairs, and 
presently I took my leave. “It is no use pressing for that 
interview?” I asked at the door. He laughed again, 
and said, “I will let you have a formal reply.” 

Three days later, to my immense surprise, I received, 
without any other word, a card admitting me to a private 
interview with H. H. Benedict XV, at three-thirty on the 
following afternoon. 

I knew that I had to wear evening clothes, and on 
that hot afternoon I entirely wrecked three white ties in 
the endeavor to make a decent bow, and then borrowed 
one from a waiter. Hiring an old carrozza, and feeling 
intensely nervous at the impending interview, I drove to 
the Vatican. My card was a magic talisman. The Swiss 
Guards grounded their pikes before me, and their officer 
bowed toward a flight of marble steps leading to the 
private apartments. I was passed on from room to 
room, saluted by gentlemen of the Pope’s bodyguard in 
impressive uniforms, until my knees weakened above the 
polished boards, my tongue clave to the roof of my 

281 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

mouth, and my waiter’s dress tie slipped up behind my 
right ear. 

Finally, in a highly self-conscious state, I reached an 
ante-chamber where I was kept waiting for ten minutes 
until a chamberlain came through a little door and beck¬ 
oned to me. As I passed through the doorway, I saw a 
tiny little man in white robes, waiting for me on the 
threshold. 

He smiled through his spectacles, took hold of my 
wrist as I went down on one knee, according to etiquette, 
hauled me up with a firm grip, and led me to two gilt 
chairs, side by side. “Now we can talk,” he said in 
French, and he sat in one chair and I in the other, in that 
big room where we were alone together. 

In a second my nervousness left me, and we had what 
the Americans call a heart-to-heart talk. The Pope did 
not use any fine phrases. He asked me a lot of questions 
about the state of Europe, the feeling in England and 
America, and then spoke about the war and its effects. 
Several times he called the war “a Scourge of God,” and 
spoke of his efforts to mitigate its misery and relieve 
some of its agonies. He alluded to the abuse he had 
received from both sides because of his neutrality and 
his repeated efforts on behalf of peace, and then waved 
that on one side and entered into a discussion on the 
economic effects of war. He saw no quick way of escape 
from ruin, no rapid means of recovery. “We must steel 
ourselves to poverty,” he said, and alluded to the great 
illusion of masses of people, duped by their leaders, that, 
after the destruction of the world’s wealth, there could 
be the same prosperity. He spoke sternly of the profi¬ 
teers, and in a pitying way of the poverty-stricken peoples. 
“The rich must pay,” he said. “Those who profited out 
of the war must pay most.” His last words, after a 
twenty-minutes’ talk, were a plea for charity and peace 
in the hearts of peoples. 


282 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

All the time he was talking, I had in the back of my 
mind the doubt whether I might publish this conversation, 
and whether, indeed, he knew my profession and purpose. 
I could not leave him with that doubt, and asked him, 
with some trepidation, if I might publish the words he 
had spoken to me. He smiled, and said, “It is the pur¬ 
pose of this conversation.” 

I hurried back to my hotel, and wrote a full account, 
and then desired to submit it for approval to the prelate 
who had obtained this great consent. But he waved it 
on one side, and said, “You can write what you like, and 
publish what you like, provided it is the truth. We trust 
you I” 

I did not abuse that trust, and my interview with the 
Pope was quoted in every newspaper in the English-speak¬ 
ing world, and created a very favorable effect. 

The raid on Fiume by d’Annunzio was a passionate 
assertion of Imperial claims denied by the Great Powers 
which have made a peace regarded by Italy as a robbery 
of all its rightful claims, but this new manifestation of 
militarism was offset by the capture of factories by Com¬ 
munist workers and the hoisting of the Red Flag in many 
industrial towns. Beneath the beauty of Rome, Florence, 
Naples, and Venice, I saw the ugly shadow of revolution 
and anarchy. 

I went from Trieste to Vienna, and saw worse things 
in a city deliberately doomed by the Allied Powers—a 
city of two million people which had once been the capital 
of a great Empire, the brilliant flower of an old civiliza¬ 
tion, and now was cut off from all its old resources of 
wealth and life. In slum streets and babies’ creches, and 
hospital wards, away from the wild vice and gayety of 
great hotels and dancing halls crowded with foreigners 
and profiteers, I saw the children of a starving city, 
stricken with rickets, scrofula, all kinds of hunger-diseases, 
and so weak that children of six or seven had no hardness 

283 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

of bone, so that they couldn’t stand up or sit up, and 
had bulbous heads above their wizened bodies. The 
women could not feed their babes for lack of milk. Men 
like skeletons in rags slouched about the streets, begging 
with clawlike hands. Ladies of good family could not 
buy underclothing or boots. Professional men, aristo¬ 
crats, Ministers of State, lived on thin soup, potatoes, 
war bread, and the very nurses in the hospitals were 
starving. The Austrian kronen became worth hardly 
more than waste paper, and despair had settled upon this 
great and beautiful city. 

I went on to Germany, deeply curious to know what 
had happened in the soul and state of this people after 
their tremendous struggle and their supreme defeat. I 
found there an immense pride of resistance to the con¬ 
sequence of defeat, an utter repudiation of war guilt, an 
intense vital energy and industry by which they hoped to 
recapture their lost trade and economic supremacy in 
Europe, a friendly feeling toward England, a deadly 
hatred toward France. Outwardly there was no sign of 
poverty or despair. There were no devastated regions, 
like those in France, no tidal wave of unemployment, 
like that in England. All the great engineering works, 
like those of Krupp which had provided a vast output of 
artillery and munitions for a world war, had adapted 
their machinery to the purposes of peace, and were manu¬ 
facturing railway engines, agricultural machines, type¬ 
writers, kitchen utensils, everything that is made of metal, 
for the world’s needs. It was staggering in its contrast 
to the lack of energy, the commercial stagnation, the 
idleness and debility of other war-tired peoples. 

But, again, I tried to see below the surface of things, 
and I saw that this feverish activity was not based on 
sound foundations of material life, but on a rotten finan¬ 
cial system and unhealthy laws. The workingman was 
underpaid and underfed, and the victim of a system of 

284 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

slave labor. The professional classes were in dire pov¬ 
erty, and what money they earned and saved lost its 
value day by day, because the German Government was 
deliberately inflating its paper money by racing the print- 
ing presses with issues of false notes which had no reality 
to back them. German export trade was capturing the 
world’s markets, but only by underselling to a rate which 
gave no real industrial profit. And whatever wealth 
Germany made, or could make, was earmarked for repa¬ 
rations and indemnities which, when the day of reckoning 
came, would make a mockery of all her efforts, reveal the 
great sham of her paper money, cast her into the depths 
of ruin, and mock at the demands of France and her Allies 
for the payment of those debts of war upon which they 
counted for their own needs and escape from ruin. 

In Germany I had long talks with some of their lead¬ 
ing politicians, bankers, and financial experts, whose fig¬ 
ures and statements I checked by consultation with our 
own Ambassador and political observers. It was not 
without a thrill of cold emotion, and dark remembrance, 
that I stood for the first time in the Reichstag and saw all 
around me those men who had been the propagandists of 
hate against England, the supporters of the War Lords, 
the faithful servants of the Kaiser and his Chancellors, 
up to the last throw in their gamblers’ game with fate, 
when all was lost. There was Scheidemann, the Social 
Democrat who had voted for all the war subsidies until 
the hour of defeat, when he voted for the new Republic. 
There was Stresemann, the leader of the People’s Party, 
and an avowed Monarchist, in spite of all that had hap¬ 
pened. There was Bernsdorff, the intriguer in America, 
up to his neck in conspiracy with dynamiters and Sinn 
Feiners and spies. These men filled me with distrust. 
Their new profession of good will to England had a hol¬ 
low sound. Yet these, and others, spoke with the utmost 
frankness about Germany’s condition, and for their own 

285 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

reasons did not hide the desperate menace of that gamble 
with national finance by which they hoped to postpone 
the inevitable crash. I was more deeply interested in 
the mentality of the ordinary German folk and their way 
of life. A strain of pacifism seemed to be working among 
them, and they were sick and saddened by their loss of 
blood in the war, terrible in its sum of death. But the 
very name of France inflamed their passion. “We are 
all pacifists,” said one man I met. “We want no more 
war—except,one 1 ” The humiliation of the French occu¬ 
pation on the Rhine, the continued insults of the French 
press, above all, the presence of Moroccan troops in 
German cities, instilled a slow poison of hate into every 
German mind. It made me afraid of the future. . . . 


286 


I 


XXII 


I N the spring of 1921 I lay on the deck of the steam¬ 
ship GratZy 7,000 tons, once Austrian and now flying 
the Italian flag, bound from Brindisi to Constantinople. 
With me as a comrade was my young son. 

Our fellow passengers were a strange company, mostly 
Jews from America, Germany, and Greece, going to sell 
surplus stocks, if they could, to merchants in Para. They 
talked interminably in terms of international exchange, 
dollars, pounds, marks, lire, drachmas, and kronen, and 
raised their hands to the God of Abraham, because of the 
stagnation of the world’s markets. There was also a 
sprinkling of dark-complexioned, somber-eyed men of un¬ 
certain nationality until we came in sight of Constanti¬ 
nople, when they changed their bowler hats or cloth caps 
for the red fez of Islam. One of them was very hand¬ 
some and elegant, with a distinguished but arrogant 
manner. I tried to get into conversation with him, 
but he answered coldly and in monosyllables until we 
passed the narrows of the Dardanelles when his eyes 
glowed with a sudden passion, and he told me he had 
fought against the British there, below the hill of Achi 
Baba. It had been a great victory, he said, for Turkish 
arms. 

There were some queer women aboard, international in 
character, given to loud, shrill laughter and amorous 
ogling. One of them, a buxom creature of middle age, 
drank champagne at night in the smoking saloon with 
one of the American Jews, enormously fat, foul in con¬ 
versation, free with his money, who seemed to covet her 
favor, and was jealous of a young Turk who, unlike 

287 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

others of his race aboard, was as noisy as a schoolboy 
and played pranks all day long up and down the ship. 

A young British officer, now “demobbed,” was resum¬ 
ing his career as a commercial traveler in woollen vests 
and socks. He showed me his diary. Before the war 
he had made as much as £3,000 in one year, as commis¬ 
sion on business with Turkish merchants in Constanti¬ 
nople, Stamboul, Smyrna. He spoke well of the Turks’ 
commercial honesty. Their word was good. They had 
always paid for orders. A simple soul, this young man 
who had been a temporary officer in the Great War, be¬ 
lieved that trade was reviving and that Europe would 
recover quickly from the effects of war. 

There were others on board who did not think so. 
“After Austria—Germany,” said the fat American Jew. 
Lying on the sun-baked decks I listened to conversations 
by these students of international business, as, for two 
years and more, since the war, I had been listening to the 
talk of men and women in Belgium, France, Italy, Austria- 
Germany, Canada, and the United States. It was always 
the same. They had no certainty of peace, no sense of 
security, but rather an apprehension of new conflicts in 
Europe and outside Europe, a fear of revolution, anarchy, 
and upheaval of forces beyond the control of men like 
themselves of international mind, business common sense. 
But here, on this boat, there was talk of peoples and 
forces not generally discussed in these other conversa¬ 
tions to which I had listened, in wayside taverns, in rail¬ 
way trains, in wooden huts on the old battlefields, in the 
drawing-rooms of London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, 
and New York. 

“The Angora Turks have got to be reckoned with.” 

. . . “Greece is out for a big gamble.” . . . “The Ar¬ 
menians have not all been massacred.” . . . “The East 
is seething like a cauldron.” . . . “It’s the oil that will 
put all the fat in the fire.” . . . “The Bolshies have got 

288 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Batoum.” . . . Mesopotamia means oil.” . . . “Russia 
is not dead yet, and make no mistake I” . . . “My God I 
This peace is just a breathing space before another bloody 
war.” . . . “It’s a world gone mad.” . . . “What we 
want is business.” 

Then back again to dollars, pounds, lire, marks, 
drachmas, kronen, roubles. 

They ate enormously at meal times, and took snacks 
between meals. The fat American Jew at my table ate 
greedily, forgetting his fork sometimes, and mopping his 
plate with bits of bread. He bullied the stewards for 
bigger or tenderer helpings. He spoke Russian, German, 
and American with equal fluency, but an international 
accent. At night there was card playing, outbursts of 
song, gusts of laughter, popping of champagne corks, 
whisperings and chasings along the dark decks, a reek of 
cigar smoke, no silence or wonderment because of the 
beauty through which our boat was passing. 

The Ionian Sea, merging into the Adriatic, was so 
calm that when our ship divided its waters, leaving be¬ 
hind a long furrow, the side of each wave was like a 
polished jewel, and reflected the patches of snow still on 
the mountain crests (though it was May, and hot) and 
the fissures in the rocks. It was unbroken by any ripple, 
except where the boat stirred its quietude by a long ruffle 
of feathers, and it was so blue that it seemed as though 
one’s hand would be dyed, like a potter’s, to the same 
color, if one dipped it in. With this sea, and the sky 
above, we went on traveling through a blue world, except 
where our eyes wandered into the gorges of those moun¬ 
tains along the coast of old Illyria, where the barren 
rocks are scarred and gleam white, or when they were 
touched by the sun’s rays at dawn and sunset and glit¬ 
tered in a golden way, or became washed with rose 
water, or all drenched in mist as purple as the Imperial 
mantle which once fell across them. All day long the 

289 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

ship was followed by a flight of sea gulls skimming on 
quiet wings and calling plaintively so that we heard again 
the sirens who cried to Ulysses as he sailed this way 
through the Enchanted Seas. 

We steamed slowly through the Gulf of Corinth, so 
narrow that if any boulder had fallen from its high 
walls it would have smashed a hole in our ship. Small 
Greek boys ran along a foot path, clamoring for pennies 
like gutter urchins beside an English char-a-banc. Then 
we lay off Athens, but in spite of a special Greek visa 
from the consulate in London for which I had paid a 
fee, I was not allowed to land. Through my glasses I 
saw, with a thrill of emotion, the tall columns of the 
Parthenon. At our ship’s side was a crowd of small 
craft rowed by brown-skinned boatmen who kept up a 
chant of Kyrie! Kyrie! (Lord! Lord!) like the Kyrie 
eleison (Lord have mercy!) of the Catholic Mass, tout¬ 
ing for the custom of passengers, as they did three thou¬ 
sand years ago, with those same shouts and waving of 
brown arms, and curses to each other, and raising of oars, 
when ships came in from Crete and Mediterranean ports 
with merchandise and travelers. 

So we passed into the iEgean Sea, and saw on our port 
side, like low-lying clouds, the Greek islands in which the 
Gods once dwelt, and the old heroes. We drew close to 
Gallipoli, and I thought of heroes more modern, lying 
there in graves that were not old, who had done deeds 
needing more courage than that of Ulysses and his men, 
and who had faced monsters of human machine guns more 
dreadful than dragons and many-headed dogs, and the 
Medusa head. The trenches were plainly visible—British 
and Turkish—and the old gun-emplacements, and the Lone 
Tree, and the barren slopes of Achi Baba where the 
flower of Australian and New Zealand youth had fallen, 
and many Irish and English boys. 

“Quite a good landing place,” said one of the pas- 

290 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

sengers by my side. I looked at him, suspecting Irony, 
and remembering the landing of the Twenty-Ninth Divi¬ 
sion, and the Australian troops, under destroying fire. 
But this elderly Jew said again, in a cheerful way, “A 
nice cove for a boat to land.” 

We went on slowly through the narrow channel, until 
in the morning sunlight we saw the glory of the Golden 
Horn and the minarets of Constantinople. It was then 
that half the passengers put on the red fez of Islam, 
and paced the deck restlessly, with their eyes strained 
toward the city of the Sultan. 

The fat American Jew touched me on the arm and 
spoke solemnly, with a kind of warning. “For those 
who don’t wear a fez Constantinople won’t be a safe 
place, I guess. They say there are bodies floating every 
morning at the Golden Horn—stabbed in the back. I’m 
keeping close to Pera.” 

The first view of the Golden Horn was as beautiful 
as I had hoped, more than I had Imagined, as we rounded 
the old Seraglio Point and saw in the early sunlight of a 
May morning the glittering panorama of Constantinople. 

The domes of San Sophia lay like rose-colored clouds 
above the cypress trees. Beyond was the great mosque 
of Suleyman, Its minarets, white and slender, cutting the 
blue sky like lances. Further back, rising above a huddle 
of brown old houses, was the mosque of Mohammad, 
the conqueror who, five hundred years ago, rode into 
San Sophia on a day of victory, over the corpses there, 
and left the Imprint of a bloody hand on one of the 
pillars where it is now sculptured in marble. White in 
the sun on the water’s edge were the long walls of the 
Sultan’s palace. One could see Galata, and the old 
bridge which crosses from Stamboul, and above, on the 
hill, Pera, with its Grand’ Rue, Its night clubs, its caba¬ 
rets, its Christian churches, and haunts of vice. 

Before we anchored, our ship was surrounded by a 

291 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

swarm of boats, as at Athens, but these were the nar¬ 
row caiques of the Golden Horn, rowed by Turks, who 
hung on by thrusting grapnel hooks through our port¬ 
holes and by clinging on to ropes. They were old sun¬ 
baked Turks, with white beards, and young Turks with 
only down on their faces and roving eyes for the un¬ 
veiled women on our decks, and together they raised a 
wild chant as they called “Effendil Effendi!” and in¬ 
vited us to go ashore. Other ships passed us—a steamer 
crowded with Russian refugees fleeing from the Bol¬ 
shevik pursuit of Wrangel, a British destroyer, sailing 
boats with leg-o’-mutton sails, billowing white above 
the blue water, and many of the little caiques where, 
on Turkish rugs, sat Turkish ladies like bundles of 
black silk, deeply veiled, so that one had no glimpse of 
a face. 

My young son and I, with light baggage, secured a 
caique with the fat American Jew, who had enormous 
cases of samples which nearly sank the boat when they 
were dumped in by the Turkish porters. We were 
rowed across the Golden Horn to the Customs ofiice by 
two Kurdish boatmen, and there were seized upon by a 
crowd of Turks who fought each other for our baggage. 
In the customs ofiice the Turkish officials were highly 
arrogant young men in uniform, who smoked innumerable 
cigarettes and refused to pass the American’s samples 
of boots and shoes until he had bribed them with some 
of his very best pairs. After that long delay we took a 
carriage and two horses and drove at a smart trot to the 
Pera Palace Hotel where I found my comrade of the war, 
Percival Phillips, and a bevy of English and American 
correspondents watching the secret progress of a drama 
which might result in another European war and set the 
whole East aflame. It was Phillips, as well as the High 
Commissioner, Admiral Webber, and various Intelligence 
officers, who “put me wise,” as the Americans say, to the 

292 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

situation which had Its secret plot In Constantinople, but 
Its fighting center In Angora. Here In “Constant” there 
was a mask of peaceful obedience to the decrees of the 
International Occupation. It was called “International,” 
and there were French and Italian troops and police on 
both side of the Galata Bridge, but the real command 
was In the hands of the British High Commissioner and 
the real power In the hands of the British fleet. The 
French were “huffy” because of that, and General Fran- 
chet de I’Esperay had left in a temper because he would 
not take orders from the British, and was up to his eyes 
in political intrigue. The Sultan was a puppet In the 
hands of the British, ready to sign any document they put 
before him, provided his personal safety was assured. 
But every Turk in his palace, and in the back streets of 
Galata and Stamboul, were rebels against his submission, 
and spies and agents on behalf of the Nationalist Turks 
In Angora. Those were the real fellows. They refused 
to recognize the Allied terms of peace, or any peace. 
They were contemptuous of the Sultan’s enforced de¬ 
crees. They even denied his religious authority. They 
had raised the old flag of Islam and were stirring up 
fanaticism through the whole Mohammadan world as 
far as India. But they were modern In their ideas and 
methods, “Nationalist” and not religious In their faith, 
like the Irish Sinn Felners who put national liberty before 
Catholic dogma. They were raising levies of Turkish 
peasants, drilling them, arming them (with French 
weapons!), teaching them that If they wanted to keep 
their land they must fight for It. There was a fellow 
named Mustapha Kemal. He would be heard of later 
in history as a great leader. He was raiding up the 
coast as far as Ismid, and little companies of British 
Tommies had had to fall back before his Irregulars. 
Not good for our prestige 1 But what could we do on the 
Asiatic side, with only a few battalions of boys? Mean- 

293 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

while, the Turks in Constantinople were sending money, 
men and munitions to the Nationalists, and there was 
precious little we could do to stop them, in spite of 
our troops and police. Why, there was gun-running 
under the Galata Bridge, almost as open as daylight! 
Mustapha Kemal’s strength was growing—nobody knew 
how strong. Perhaps it was underestimated. Perhaps 
one day the Greeks, holding a long line across Asia Minor 
for the protection of Smyrna, would get a nasty surprise. 
Who could trust a Greek Army, anyhow? And what was 
the British Government—that beggar Lloyd George!— 
doing with all their pro-Greek policy? It was doing us 
no good in the Mohammadan world. Even India was 
getting restless because their political agitators were pre¬ 
tending the Sultan was a prisoner and the Prophet in¬ 
sulted! Not that the Indian Mohammadans cared a 
curse about the Sultan really, belonging to a different sect. 
But it was all propaganda, and dangerous. The whole 
situation was full of danger, and Constantinople was a 
very interesting city in this time of history. 

That was the gist of the conversation I heard from 
Phillips, and British Intelligence officers, and naval lieu¬ 
tenants, and travelers from the Near or Far East, in the 
smoking room of the Pera Hotel, which looked out to 
the Grand’ Rue with its ceaseless procession of Turks, 
Greeks, Armenians, Israelites, French and Italian officers, 
Persians, Arabs, Negroes, Gypsies, American “drum¬ 
mers,” British soldiers, and Russian refugees—the queer¬ 
est High Street in the world, the meeting place between 
the East and the West, the unsafe sanctuary of those 
in flight from the greatest tragedy in the world, which 
was in Russia. 

For one scene in this drama the dining room of the 
Pera Palace Hotel—a thieves’ kitchen in the way of fleec¬ 
ing the visitor—was an entertaining prologue. Rich 
Turks came here to listen to incautious conversations by 

294 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

foreign journalists, or irresponsible young middies from 
the British fleet lying in the Bosphorus, or to act as liaison 
oflicers between Mustapha Kemal and his political sup¬ 
porters in the sacred city. There was one Turkish family 
who dined here every day, the women unveiled as a sign 
of their modernism, and one of them so beautiful with 
her dark liquid eyes touched by kohl, that she had to 
sustain the gaze of young Christian dogs in naval uni¬ 
form—and did not seem to mind. Greek and Armenian 
merchants brought their ladies here, dressed in Paris 
fashions by way of the Grand’ Rue de Pera, and light 
in their way of behavior, despite the glowering eyes of 
old Turks who watched them sullenly. Cossack officers 
who had lost their command, and all but their pride, 
came in full uniform, with black tunics crossed by cartridge 
belts, high, black boots, and astrachan caps. One of 
them was a giant with a close-cropped head like a Prus¬ 
sian officer, and a powerful, brutal face, but elegant 
drawing-room manners, as when he bent over the hands 
of lady friends and kissed their rings. These last fugi¬ 
tives from the last expedition against Bolshevik Russia 
lived gayly for a time on the diamonds they had hidden 
in their boots. Their motto was the old one: “Let’s eat, 
drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die I” They gave 
banquets to each other while they had any means of pay¬ 
ing the bill. That was easy while they had a few jewels, 
for in a private room at the Pera Palace were Jew 
dealers who would value a diamond ring with expert 
knowledge and pay in Turkish pounds. One general 
paid for his dinner party in a different way. At the end 
of the meal he took his wife’s fur tippet from her 
shoulders, handed it to the waiter, and said, “Bring me 
the change!” 

Their own paper money was almost worthless in pur¬ 
chasing value, whether Czarist roubles, or Denikin 
roubles, or Soviet roubles. One of the Cossack officers 

295 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

ordered a cocktail, and paid 100,000 roubles for the little 
nip of stimulant. 

Once or twice a week there was a dance after dinner 
at this hotel patronized by the younger officers of the 
British and American fleets and the society of Pera. 
Some of the women there were beautiful, though mostly 
too plump, which is the way of Greek ladies and Ar¬ 
menian, after a certain age. Their shoulders rose above 
their low-cut dresses. Young naval lieutenants winked 
at each other, sometimes danced with each other and 
said, “Hot stuff, dear child I Beware!” 

In such a place, at such a time, there was no sense of 
the East, near or far, no reminder of the tragedies within 
a stone’s throw of the windows, no reminder of great 
menace creeping across the clock of Time to this city 
and its mixed inhabitants, no fear of massacre. Yet, 
when I went outside that hotel, by day, and often by 
night, I was aware of those things, smelt something evil 
here, beyond the noxious stench of the narrow streets. 
The Turks who slouched up the Grand’ Rue, or crowded 
the bazaars of Stamboul and Galata, had no love for 
the Christian inhabitants, civil or military. I saw them 
spit now and then, when British Tommies passed giving 
the glad eye to young Turkish women who let down their 
veils like window blinds hurriedly drawn. 

Often I went down to the Galata Bridge with my 
young son, glancing often over my shoulder when there 
was any crush, because I did not want his young life 
ended by a stab in the back which happened sometimes, 
I was told, to soldier boys of ours. Beyond that bridge, 
where two Turks stood receiving toll from all who 
passed, was the beginning of the East, stretching away 
and away to that great swarming East which was held 
back from Europe by a few battleships, a few British 
regiments, and the last prestige of the European peoples, 
weakened by its internecine warfare. Could we hold back 

296 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the East forever, or even the Turkish nationalists from 
this city on the Bosphorus? Across the bridge came 
Turkish porters carrying great loads at the nape of the 
neck, Persians in high fur caps, Kurds, Lazis, Arabs, 
Soudanese, negroes, Gypsy queens in tattered robes, 
smart young Turks in black coats and the red fez, Turk¬ 
ish women in blue silk gowns, deeply veiled. In the 
bazaars near by there were swarms of Turks, Armenians, 
and Jews, selling German and American goods. Oriental 
spices, Turkish and Persian carpets, dried fruits, shell oil. 
Around the mosques of Stamboul sat groups of Turks 
smoking their narghili and talking, between the hours 
when they washed their feet according to the law of 
the Prophet. Camel caravans, with mangy, tired beasts, 
heavily laden, plodded down narrow streets, and their 
drivers had news to tell, exciting to little groups of 
Turks who gathered round. What news? What excite¬ 
ment? . . . There were hidden emotions, passions, se¬ 
crets, among these people, at which I could only guess, 
or fail to guess. 

I thought of a story I had heard of the Reverend 
Mother in a Catholic convent here in Constantinople. 
She had a Turkish porter at the convent gate, an old 
man who had been a faithful servant. She asked him 
if he thought there would be any rising in the city among 
the Turks, and, if so, whether her convent school would 
be respected. “Do not be afraid,” he said. “When the 
massacre begins I myself will kill you without any pain.” 
He promised her an easy death. 

There was, I thought, only one safeguard against mas¬ 
sacre in this city seething with racial hatred. It was the 
fear of those young British soldiers, with their French 
comrades, and sailor cousins, who kept order in Con¬ 
stantinople. It was a fear inspired mainly by British 
prestige. We had no great strength at that time, as far 
as I could see, less than two full Divisions of infantry— 

297 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

mostly boys who had been too young to fight in the 
Great War—and some Indian cavalry, Mohammadans 
like the Turks. In the Bosphorus, it was true, there was 
a considerable fleet, led by the Iron Duke, and some 
American warships, but a rising in Constantinople, an 
attack on the European quarters, would lead to dirty 
work. There would be many Christian throats cut. 

The British troops did not seem nervous. They are 
never nervous, but take things as they come. At the 
upper end of the Rue de Pera there were numbers of 
wine shops and dancing halls where they gathered in the 
evenings. As I passed them I saw groups like those with 
which I had been familiar in the estaminets on the West¬ 
ern front. They were singing the same old songs. 
Through the swing doors came gusts of laughter and 
those choruses roared by lusty voices. In Constantinople 
as in Flanders! The Y.M.C.A. was doing good work in 
keeping them out of temptation’s way, down back alleys, 
where Greek girls waited for them, or where Turkish 
ladies hid in the dark courtyards. On the whole they 
gave no great trouble to the “red caps” who rounded 
them up at night. The American Jacks gave more. 
Coming from “dry” ships, they drew a bee line for the 
booze shops, and were mad drunk rapidly. The British 
A.P.M. with whom I went round the city one night, had 
the genial permission from the American Admiral 
to have them knocked on the head by the naval police 
as quickly and smartly as possible. It was safer for 
them. 

I shall never forget one of those young American 
sailors whom I encountered at a music hall close to the 
Pera Palace, known as the “Petits Champs.” A variety 
show was given there nightly, by Russian singers and 
dancers with a Russian orchestra, and it was crowded 
with all the races of the world which met in Constanti¬ 
nople. Some of the dancing girls had been ladies of 

298 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

quality in Russia. Now they showed their bodies to this 
assembly of wine-drinking men and evil women, of East 
and West, for the wages of life. The orchestra played 
Russian music with a wild lilt in it—the rhythm of the 
primitive soul of the old Slav race. It worked madness 
in the brain of the young American Jack, who sat next 
to me, with one of his petty officers. He was a nice, 
sweet-faced fellow, but with too much beer in him to 
withstand this music. For a time he contented himself 
with dangling his watch in his glass of beer, but presently 
his body swayed to the rhythm, and he waved his hand¬ 
kerchief to the ladies on the stage. Then he seized a 
great tin tray from a passing waiter and danced the hula- 
hula with it, with frightful crashes and bangs. No one 
took much notice of him. The petty officer smiled, as at a 
pleasant jest. Our own sailors were merry and bright, 
and there was a great noise in the cabaret of the Petits 
Champs. 

There was no noise, but a kind of warm silence, if 
such a thing may be, in a Turkish house on the hillside 
overlooking the Bosphorus, where my son and I took 
dinner with a young English merchant and his wife. It 
was an old wooden house called a “palace,” with a broad 
balcony above a little tangled garden. Down there 
among the trees with a little old mosque with one minaret, 
and far below the British fleet lay at anchor, mirrored in 
the glasslike water. The spearheads of black cypress 
trees in our garden pointed to the first stars of evening 
in a turquoise sky, faintly flushed by the rose tints of sun¬ 
set. Beyond, the Asiatic shore stretched away, with 
the lights of Scutari clustered at the water’s edge below 
the slopes of Bulgaria, and clear-cut against the sky 
rose the tall white minarets of Buyak Djami, the great 
mosque built in honor of Mirimah, the daughter of ’ 
Suleyman the Magnificent. A band was playing on one 
of our warships, and its music came faintly up to us. 

299 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

When it ceased, there was a great silence around us, 
except for the flutter of bats skimming along our balcony. 

The young English merchant—the head of the greatest 
trading house in the Near East—sat back in a cane chair, 
talking somberly of the stagnation of his business owing 
to the effects of war and the failure of peace. He was 
anxious about the Nationalists in Angora. That fellow 
Mustapha Kemal—The Greeks might not have the 
strength to hold Smyrna I Every Turk had vowed to get 
back Smyrna at all costs. It was the worst wound to 
their pride. The future was very uncertain. Damned 
bad for trade. What was going to happen in Europe 
with all these race hatreds, political intrigues, jealousies 
between French and British, Italian and French, Greeks 
and all others. Venizelos had claimed too much. More 
than Greece could hold. . . . 

He was newly married, this young merchant of the 
Near East, and his wife was beautiful and restless, and 
rather bored. She liked dancing better than anything in 
the world, and had enjoyed it on the Iron Duke with 
young British officers. Her merchant husband was not 
keen on it—especially when his wife danced with those 
young naval officers, I thought. He was a little annoyed 
now when she brought a gramaphone on to the balcony 
and set it going to a dance tune and offered her arms 
to a boy who had brought the latest steps from London 
—my son. While they moved about to the rhythm of a 
rag-time melody, the young merchant continued his analy¬ 
sis of a situation ugly with many perils and troubles, and 
then was silent over his pipe. From the garden came an¬ 
other kind of music as the rose flush faded from the sky 
and the cypress trees were blacker against a paler blue. 
A white-robed figure stood in the little turret of the 
minaret and turned eastward and raised his voice in a 
long-drawn chant, rising and falling in the Oriental scale 
of half-tones. It was the imam, calling to the Faithful 

300 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

of the Prophet in the city of Mohammad. It was the 
voice of the East as it has called through the centuries 
to desert and city and camel tracks, to the soul of Eastern 
peoples under this sky and stars. It rose above the music 
of a gramaphone playing rag-time melody, and called 
across the waters of the Bosphorus where Western bat¬ 
tleships were lying, with their long guns, like insects with 
their legs outstretched, as we looked down on them. 
Faintly from the shadow world, and through this warm- 
scented air of an evening in Constantinople, came answer¬ 
ing voices, wailing, as the imams in each minaret of the 
city of mosques, gave praise to God, and to Mohammad 
his Prophet. 

“The Turks aren’t finished yet,” said the young Eng¬ 
lish merchant. “And behind the Turk is Russia—and 
the East.” 

A chill made me shiver a little. . . . The sun had 
gone down. 

With Percival Phillips, sometimes, we visited the 
mosques and explored Turkish street life on the Stamboul 
side of Constantinople, and went up to Eyoub and the 
Sweet Waters of Europe, and wandered among the 
charred ruins of a quarter of the city where a great fire 
had raged. Once, with the young commercial traveler 
in vests and pants—three years before an officer in the 
Great War—we walked to lonely districts where the 
Indian cavalry had pitched their camps beyond the city 
and when in a little Turkish coffee shop, remote and soli¬ 
tary, some wild Gypsy women in tattered robes of many 
colors, through which could be seen their bare brown 
limbs, danced and sang. No need to ask the origin of 
the Gypsy folk after seeing these. They were people of 
the Far East, and their songs had the harsh and ancient 
melody of Oriental nomads. 

“Not particularly safe to wander far afield like this,” 
said the young commercial traveler. He told stories of 

301 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Turkish robbers and assassins in the outskirts of the 
city. But no harm befell us. 

In narrow streets off the Grand’ Rue de Pera, we came 
into touch with another aspect of life in Constantinople— 
the heart of the Russian tragedy among the Royalist 
refugees. Those people had arrived in successive waves 
of flight following the defeat and rout of the “White” 
expedition under Denikin, Wrangel, and others. The 
luckiest among them, who had jewels to sell and a business 
instinct, had set up little restaurants and wine shops in 
Pera. Somehow or other many of them were able to get 
enough money to eat and drink in these places, and they 
were always filled with Russian officers in uniform, with 
their ladies. Those who served were often of higher 
rank than those who dined, and a score of times I saw an 
officer rise, bow profoundly, and kiss the hand of the 
waiting girl before he ordered his bortsch. Probably 
she was a Princess. One could hardly order a cup of 
tea in Constantinople without receiving it from a Russian 
princess or at least a lady of quality in the old regime. 
I had a pork chop handed to me by a bald-headed man 
with an apron round his waist whom I knew afterward 
as the Admiral of the late Czar’s yacht. His fellow 
serving men were aristocrats and intellectuals, wearing 
white linen jackets and doing their job as waiters with 
dignity as well as skill. Poor devils I In spite of their 
courage and their gayety, they were having a rough life 
in Constantinople with no hope ahead, except the fading 
dreams that Soviet Russia would be overthrown by some 
internal plot or foreign intervention. In spite of all the 
millions lent to Russia by Great Britain, and all the arms 
and ammunition supplied by us to Koltchak, Denikin, 
and all the “White” Armies, they regarded England as 
the chief cause of their repeated failures, and as a nation 
which had not helped their cause with proper loyalty. 
It was the one-time Admiral of the Czar’s yacht who 

302 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

made this complaint to me, and said, “England has be- 
trayed us I” 

That evening I sat with a young British naval officer 
in the Pera Palace hotel and heard the other side of the 
story. He had been looking angrily at some Cossack 
officers and their ladies, laughing over their coffee cups. 

“Pm not bloodthirsty,” he said, “but it would give me 
the greatest pleasure in the world to cut one of those 
fellow’s throats.” 

He told me the cause of his bitterness—the inefficiency, 
the corruption, the vanity, the damned selfishness, the 
jealousy of those White officers. We had sent out vast 
stores of arms and ammunition, but they never got to the 
front. Crowds of these fellows, swaggering about in 
uniform, never went near their wretched men in the 
trenches, and were hundreds of miles behind, gambling, 
drinking, indulging in amorous adventure. The women 
were just as bad, many of them. Worse, if anything! 
We had sent out consignments of clothes for the Russian 
nurses, who were in rags at the front where they were 
looking after the wounded. That underclothing, those 
stockings, and boots, and raincoats never reached the 
nurses. They had been seized and worn by the female 
harpies hundred of miles behind the line. He had more 
respect for the Reds than for this White rabble. One 
day the British taxpayer would want to know why we 
were keeping thousands of them in the island of Prinkipo 
and elsewhere. . . . 

I went out to Prinkipo, and did not feel the bitterness 
of that young officer who had no patience with our 
charity. A boatload of refugees, with a crowd of women 
and children, had just arrived and were sitting among 
their bundles and boxes on the quayside, forlorn, melan¬ 
choly, sick after a long voyage across the Black Sea, and 
after the horror of flight from the Red Terror. We 
could not let them starve to death without a helping hand. 

303 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Certainly we were doing them rather well on Prinkipo, 
and it seemed to me an island of delight where I, for one, 
would gladly have stayed a month or two, or a year or 
two, if my own folk had been there. These Russian 
exiles made the best of it. Their laughter rang out in a 
wooden restaurant where a party of them dined to the 
music of a little orchestra which played mad and merry 
music. Some of those Russian girls were amazingly beau¬ 
tiful, patrician in manner and grace. 

Along a road leading through green woods to a golden 
shore lapped by little frothing waves, came a cavalcade 
of Russians on donkeys, which they raced with each other, 
screaming with laughter. Further on, where the woods 
ended, there was a smooth greensward on which a crowd 
of Russian folk were dancing ‘to the music of a hurdy- 
gurdy. Hand in hand young Russian men and women, 
once great people in Moscow and Odessa, wandered 
playing the pleasant game of love-in-idleness. Not too 
bad to be a refugee at Prinkipo, until they awakened 
from their lotus eating to the hopelessness of their state, 
to the raggedness of their clothes, to their life without 
purpose and prospect, and, later on, to a new menace of 
death from bloodthirsty Turks in alliance with Red 
Russia. There would not be much good will to Russian 
Royalists living here on Prinkipo in the wooden villas 
and palaces built by Turkish pashas for their summer 
pleasure. 

When the last wave of flight came, after WrangePs 
downfall, Prinkipo became overcrowded and fever- 
stricken, and the Russians in Constantinople, tens of 
thousands of poverty-stricken folk of peasant class, 
would have starved to death but for the charity of 
British and American relief work. They were panic- 
stricken as well as poverty-stricken, after the burning of 
Smyrna. 

So in Constantinople I saw the drama of a city in which 

304 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the East met the West—across the Galata Bridge—and 
where the strife and agony of many races upheaved by 
war and revolution, seethed as in a human cauldron. In 
this city of the Mohammadan world, and of Russia 
in exile, and of French, German, Italian, and Greek in¬ 
trigue, the peace of the world did not seem secure and 
lasting. It filled me with sinister forebodings. 


305 


XXIII 


I T was a British ship which took me from Constanti¬ 
nople to Smyrna, and it gave me a thrill of patriotic 
pleasure to get porridge for breakfast, and ham and 
eggs with buttered toast. 

Apart from the officers and crew, there were few Eng¬ 
lish folk aboard. I can only remember one—a good- 
looking and good-humored major, who was bound for 
Alexandria in company with a pretty Greek woman who 
seemed to be under his chivalrous protection. The other 
first-class passengers were Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. 
On the lower deck were groups of Italian soldiers who 
sang and danced continuously, a few Turks, an old Arab 
woman in a dirty white robe, who gazed all day long 
over the side of the ship as though reading some spell of 
fate in the lace work patterns of froth woven by our 
passage through the dead calm sea, and families of 
Israelites lying among their bundles. 

It was good to lie on the boat deck in the direct glare 
of the sun, pouring its warmth down from a cloudless 
sky, and to watch with half-shut eyes the golden glitter 
of the sea and its change of color and light from deepest 
blue to palest green, as the currents crossed our track 
and white clouds passed overhead and the sun sank low, 
as evening came. Fairy islands, dreamlike and unsub¬ 
stantial, appeared on the far horizon, and then seemed 
to sink below its golden bar. At night the sky was 
crowded with stars, shining with a piercing brightness, 
and it seemed no wonder then that to each of them the 
Greeks had given a name and godlike attributes. They 
seemed closer to the world than in an English sky. 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

heaven’s brilliant train, and on this ship in a lonely sea— 
no other boat passed us—the company of the stars was 
friendly and benign. 

From the lower deck came the singing of the Italian 
soldiers, with their liquid words and open notes, in which 
I heard something very old in the melody of life. The 
Greeks were singing, too, in a separate group, softly, to 
themselves, and with a melancholy cadence. Tiny sparks 
of fire, like glow-worms, flitted to and fro on the lower 
deck. It was the glow of cigarette ends, as the Italian 
soldiers danced the fox trot and the one step. Now and 
then a match was lighted, and one saw it held in the 
hollow of brown hands, illumining a dark Italian face. 

My son and I sat on coils of rope, up on the boat deck, 
with a Greek girl with whom we had made friends. She 
talked and talked, and held us spellbound by her philos¬ 
ophy of life, her gayety, her bitter wisdom, her fearless¬ 
ness and wit. It was a short voyage, and we have never 
seen her again, but we shall not forget that laughing 
Greek girl who spoke half the languages of Europe, and 
English perfectly, and American with such intimate ac¬ 
quaintance that she could sing little old nigger songs with 
perfect accent, as it seemed to us. Yet she had never 
been in England or America, and had spent nearly all 
her life in Constantinople, with brief visits to Greece, 
and two frightful years in Russia. She had learnt Eng¬ 
lish, and her negro songs, in the American College at 
Constantinople, to which she looked back with adoration, 
though she had been a naughty rebel against all its 
discipline. 

As a governess to a German family in Russia, she had 
learnt another language—besides Russian, Greek, French, 
Turkish and English—and had been thoroughly amused 
with life, until the Red Revolution broke in Moscow. 
Her Germans fled, leaving her alone in their empty flat, 
and then she learnt more than ever she had guessed about 

307 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the cruelties of life. Her life was saved by her gayety 
and “cheek,” as she called it. When a crowd of Red 
soldiers threatened to slit her throat, she jeered at them, 
and then made them roar with laughter by playing comic 
songs on the piano and singing them with merry pan¬ 
tomime. That was all right, but she starved and went in 
expectation of death month after month. Her Russian 
friends, students and intellectuals, were mostly shot or 
hanged. She recognized some of them as they hung 
from lamp-posts in the streets, and gave us a vivid imita¬ 
tion of how they looked, with their necks cricked and 
their tongues hanging out. She became used to that sort 
of thing. . . . After wandering adventures, abominable 
hardships, in dirt and rags, she got through at last to 
Constantinople, and lived for a time on a Greek gun¬ 
boat, as one of the crew, wearing one of their caps and a 
sailor’s jersey. They saved her from starving to death, 
until she was able to get in touch with her family. Now 
she was going to Alexandria, as a typist in an English 
office. 

She was tremendously amused with all this experience. 
She wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It was the 
adventure of life, and the great game. There was noth¬ 
ing in life but that—and what did death matter after this 
adventure whenever it came! We spoke of war, and the 
chance of world peace, and she scoffed at the chance. 
War was inevitable—the greatest adventure of all. 
Cruelty?—Yes, that was part of the adventure. Men 
were heartless, but amusing, even in their cruelties. It 
was no good looking at life seriously, breaking one’s heart 
over impossible ideals. It was best to laugh and take 
things as they came, and shrug one’s shoulders, whatever 
happened. It was Life 1 ... So we talked under the 
stars. 

There was another girl on board who talked to us. 
She belonged to a different type and race—a tragic type, 

308 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

and Armenian. She had some frightful photographs in a 
satchel which she wore always round her waist. They 
were photographs of Turkish atrocities in Asia Minor. 
There was one of a Turkish officer sitting on a pile of 
skulls and smoking a cigarette. Those skulls had once 
held the living brains of this girl’s family and townsfolk 
at Samsun. She told me of the death march of the 
Armenians when the Turks drove them from the coast 
into the interior. The women and children had been 
separated from their men folk, who were then massacred. 
Her father and brother had been killed like that. They 
passed their bodies on the roadsides. The women and 
children had been driven forward until many dropped 
and died, until all were barefoot and exhausted to the 
point of death. Kurdish brigands had robbed them of 
the little money they had, and their rings. Some of the 
younger girls were carried off. Their screams were 
heard for a long way. There were not many who reached 
the journey’s end. ... A terrible tale, told with a white 
passion of hate against the Turk, but without tears, and 
coldly, so that it made me shiver. 

In that ship, sailing under the stars in the iEgean Sea, 
I learnt more than I had known about the infernal history 
of mankind during war and revolution. I had seen it in 
the West. These were stories of the East, unknown and 
unrecorded, as primitive in their horror as when Assyrians 
fought Egyptians, or the Israelites were put to the sword 
in the time of Judas Maccabaeus. 

Our ship put in at Mitylene, and with the Greek girl 
we explored the port and walked up the hillside to an old 
fort built by the Venetians in the great days when Venice 
was the strongest sea power in that part of the world. 
On the way, the Greek girl chatted to shopkeepers and 
peasants in their own tongue, and hers, and then climbed 
to the top of the fort, sitting fearlessly on the edge of 
the wall and looking back to the sea over which we had 

309 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

traveled, and down to our ship, so small as we saw it from 
this height. 

In the valley, Greek peasants of better type and stock 
than those at Athens, and true descendants of the people 
whose tools and gods and jewels they turn up sometimes 
with their spades, were leading their sheep and goats. 
Some of them were singing and the sound rose clear up 
the hillside with a tinkling of goat bells and the baaing 
of the sheep. Wild flowers were growing in the old walls 
of the fort, and the hillside was silvered with daisies. 
We seemed very close to the blue canopy of the sky 
above us, as we sat on the edge of the wall, and in the 
warm sunshine, and above that calm, crystal-clear sea, 
mirroring our ship, we seemed to be touched by the im¬ 
mortality of the gods, and to be invested with the beauty 
of the springtime of the world. 

“It would be good to stay here,” said the Greek girl. 
“We could keep goats and sing old Greek songs.” 

However, presently she was hungry, and scrambled off 
the wall and said, “The ship—and supper!” 

So we went down to the little port again and rowed 
away from Mitylene to the ship which was sounding its 
siren for our return. 

We reached Smyrna next morning, and I, for one, was 
astonished by the modern aspect of its sea frontage, upon 
which the sun poured down. Beyond the broad quays it 
swept round the gulf in a wide curve of white houses, 
faced with marble and very handsome along the side in¬ 
habited, I was told, by rich Armenian merchants. 

“The Turks will never rest till they get Smyrna back,” 
said the English major by my side, and his words came 
as a sharp reminder of the lines away beyond the hills, 
where a Greek army lay entrenched against the Turkish 
nationalists and Mustapha Kemal. But no shadow of 
doom crept through the sunlight that lay glittering upon 
those white-fronted houses, nor did I guess that one day, 

310 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

not far ahead, Englishmen, like myself, looking over the 
side of this ship, would see the beauty of that city de¬ 
voured by an infernal fury of flame, and listen to the 
screams of panic-stricken crowds on those broad quay¬ 
sides, hidden behind rolling clouds of smoke. . . . 

When we landed, in the harbor-master’s pinnace, we 
found that we had come on a day of festival among the 
Greek army of occupation and the Greek inhabitants of 
Smyrna. All the ships in the harbor—among them the 
very gunboat in which our Greek lady had lived as one 
of the crew—were dressed in bunting, and flags were 
flying from many buildings. Greek officers, very dandi¬ 
fied, in much decorated uniforms, with highly polished 
boots, drove along the esplanade in open carriages, carry¬ 
ing great bouquets, on their way to a review by the Com- 
mander-in-Chief outside the city. Smyrniote girls, Greek 
and Armenian, were in fancy frocks and high-heeled shoes 
tripping gayly along with young Greek soldiers. Bands 
were playing as they marched, and all the air thrilled 
with the music of trumpets and military pomp. Few 
Turks were visible among those Christian inhabitants. 
They were mostly dockside laborers and porters, wear¬ 
ing the red fez of Islam. 

It was the English major who told me of the horror 
that had happened here when the Greeks first landed. 
They had rowed off from their transports in boats, and 
a crowd of these Turkish porters had helped to draw 
the boats up to the quayside. All the Christian popula¬ 
tion was on the front, waving handkerchiefs from win¬ 
dows and balconies. Ladies of the American Red Cross 
were looking at the scene from the balcony of the Grand 
Hotel Splendid Palace—what a name I There was no 
sign of hostility from the Turks, but suddenly the Greek 
soldiers seemed to go mad, and started bayoneting the 
Turks who had helped them to land. In view of all the 
women and children who had assembled to greet them 

311 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

with delirious joy, they murdered those defenseless men 
and flung their bodies into the sea. It was a crime for 
which many poor innocents were to pay when the Turkish 
irregulars came into Smyrna with the madness of victory 
after the destruction of the Greek army by Mustapha 
Kemal and his Nationalist troops. Well, that grim secret 
of fate lay hidden in the future when Tony and I booked 
rooms at the Grand Hotel Splendid Palace and enter¬ 
tained our little Greek lady to breakfast, and then at mid¬ 
day waved towels out of the bedroom window in answer 
to her signals from the ship which took her on her way 
to Alexandria and another adventure of life. The Eng¬ 
lish major brought a bucket to the upper deck, as we 
could see distinctly and wrung a towel over it as a sign 
of tears. We made the countersign. . . . 

The sea front of Smyrna, with its modern marble- 
fronted houses, masked an older and more romantic city, 
as we found in many walks in all its quarters. It masked 
the Turkish squalor of little streets of wooden shops and 
booths where crowds of Turkish women, more closely 
veiled than those in Constantinople, bargained for silks 
and slippers and household goods. In the old markets 
at the end of Frank Street, now a heap of cindered ruins, 
we sauntered through the narrow passages with vaulted 
roofs where old Turks sat cross-legged in their alcoves, 
selling carpets from Ouchak and Angora, dried raisins 
and vegetables, strips of colored silk for Turkish dresses, 
Sofrali linen, Manissa cotton, German-made hardware, 
and all manner of rubbish from the East and West, 
drenched in the aroma of spices, moist sugar, oil, and 
camels. 

I was anxious, as a journalist, to get the latest informa¬ 
tion about the military situation away to the back of 
Smyrna, and for that purpose called upon the British 
Military Mission, represented by a General Hamilton 
and his staff. A charming and courteous man, he was 

312 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

obviously embarrassed by my visit, not knowing how 
much to tell me of a situation which was extremely deli¬ 
cate in a political as well as a military way. He decided 
to tell me nothing, and I did not press him, seeing his 
trouble. 

I obtained all the information I wanted, and even 
more than I bargained for, from the Greek authorities. 
The fact that I represented The Daily Chronicle^ known 
for its pro-Greek sympathies and for its official connec¬ 
tion with Lloyd George’s Government, gave me an almost 
embarrassing importance. No sooner had I revealed 
my journalistic mission than I received a visit from a 
Greek staff officer—Lieutenant Casimatis—who put the 
entire city of Smyrna at my feet, as it were, and as one 
small token of my right to fulfill the slightest wish, sent 
round a powerful military car with two tall soldiers, 
under orders to obey my commands. Tony was pleased 
with this attention and other courtesies that were show¬ 
ered upon us. It was he, rather than myself, who inter¬ 
viewed the Commander-in-Chief of the Greek army, and 
received the salutes of its soldiers as we drove up mag¬ 
nificently to General Headquarters. 

A military band was playing outside—selections from 
“Patience,” by some strange chance—and in the ante¬ 
chamber of the General’s room Greek staff officers, 
waisted, highly polished, scented, swaggered in and out. 
The Commander-in-Chief was a very fat old gentleman, 
uncomfortable in his tight belt, and perspiring freely 
on that hot day. The windows of his room were open, 
and the merry music floated in, and the scent of flowers, 
and of the warm sea. “He received us most politely,” 
as poor Fragson used to sing in one of my brother’s plays, 
and with his fat fingers moving about a big map, explained 
the military situation. It was excellent, he said. The 
Greek army was splendid, in training and morale, and 
longing to advance against the Turk, who was utterly 

313 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

demoralized. Those poor Turkish peasants, forcibly en¬ 
listed by Mustapha Kemal, wanted nothing but leave to 
to go home. The Greek advance would be a parade—the 
Commander-in-Chief, speaking in French, repeated his 
words with relish and pride—“a parade, sir!” Unfor¬ 
tunately, he said, Greece was hampered by differences 
among the Allies. The French were certainly intriguing 
with the Turkish Nationalists of Angora—supplying them 
with arms and ammunition I The Italians were no better, 
and very jealous of Greek claims in Asia Minor. Greece 
had trust, however, in the noble friendship of England, 
in the sympathy and aid of that great statesman, Mr. 
Lloyd George. . . . The Greek army would astonish the 
world. 

So the old gentleman talked, and I listened politely, 
and asked questions, and kept my doubts to myself. 
There was not a British officer I had met anywhere, except 
General Hamilton in Smyrna, who had a good word to 
say for the fighting qualities of Greek soldiers. There 
' was not one I had met who believed that they could hold 
Smyrna for more than a year or two, until the Turks 
reorganized. 

It was Lieutenant Casimatis who introduced us to the 
Commander-in-Chief, and he devoted himself to the task 
of presenting us to all the people of importance in Smyrna, 
and taking us to schools, hospitals, museums, and other 
institutions which would prove to us the benevolence and 
high culture of Greek rulers in Asia Minor. He was a 
cheery, stout little man, speaking English, which he had 
learnt in India, and almost bursting with good nature and 
the desire to pump us with Greek propaganda. 

He took us to the Greek Metropolitan at Smyrna, a 
black-bearded, broad-shouldered, loud-laughing, excit¬ 
able Bishop of the Orthodox Church, wearing the high 
black hat and long black robe of his priestly office, but 
reminding us of one of those Princes of the Church in 

314 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

the Middle Ages who led their armies to battle and 
sometimes wielded a battleax in the name of the Lord. 

An old ruffian, I heard him called by an English mer¬ 
chant of Bournabat, whose sympathies, however, were 
decidedly pro-Turk. A picture representing the martyr¬ 
dom^ of St. Polycarp at Smyrna, in the early days of the 
Christian era, adorned the wall opposite his desk, and 
he waved his hand toward it and spoke of the martyrdom 
of the Christian people, not so long ago as that, but only 
a year or two ago, when they were driven from the coast, 
as that Armenian girl had told me. “The spirit of St. 
Polycarp,” he said, in barbarous French, “animates the 
Greek Christians to-day, and nothing would give me 
greater joy than to die for the faith as he did.” I have 
never heard whether this pious wish was fulfilled. It 
seems to me probable. 

For a long time he talked of the sufferings of the 
Greeks and Armenians, calling upon various men in the 
room—his secretaries and priests—to bear witness to 
the truth of his tales. Presently, with some ceremony, 
servants came round with silver trays laden with glasses 
of iced water and some little plates containing a white 
glutinous substance. As the guest of ceremony, it was my 
privilege to be served first, which did not give me the 
chance of watching what others might do. I took a 
spoonful of the white substance, and swallowed it, hop¬ 
ing'for the best. But it was the worst that I had done. 
I discovered afterward that it was a resinous stuff 
called mastica^ something in the nature of chewing gum. 
The mouthful I had swallowed had a most disturbing 
effect upon my. system, and even the Metropolitan was 
alarmed. My son Tony, served second, was in the same 
trouble. 

In the Greek schools of Smyrna all the scholars were 
kept in during the luncheon hour, while we went from 
class to class inspecting their work and making polite 

315 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

bows and speeches to the teachers. The scholars, rang¬ 
ing from all ages of childhood, did not seem to bear us 
any grudge for their long wait for lunch, and we were 
much impressed by their discipline, their pretty manners, 
their beautiful eyes. Tony felt like the Prince of Wales, 
and was conscious of the “glad eyes” of the older girls. 
. . . When Smyrna was reported to be a city of fire and 
massacre, I thought with dreadful pity of those little ones. 

We touched with our very hands the spirit of this 
ancient race in the time of its glory, when we went into 
the museum and handled the pottery, the gods, the house¬ 
hold ornaments, the memorials—found by peasants with 
their picks not far below the soil—of that time when 
Homer was born (it is claimed) in this city of the iEgean, 
when the lonians held it, when Lysimachus made it great 
and beautiful, until it was one of the most prosperous 
ports in the world, crowded with Greek and Roman and 
Syrian ships trading between the West and East. 

Lieutenant Casimatis took us to his little home away 
on a lonely road beyond the Turkish quarter, and we 
spent an evening with his family, a handsome wife and 
three beautiful children who sang little songs to us in 
French and Greek. The poor lady was nervous. Some 
shadow of fear was upon her because of that Turkish 
army beyond the Greek trenches. I hope with all my 
heart she escaped from Smyrna with her babes before 
the horror happened. ... I drank to the welfare of 
Greece in the sweet resinous wine which Lieutenant Casi¬ 
matis poured out for us. It was a sincere wish, but at 
the back of my mind was some foreboding. 

We drove out one day to Boudja and Bournabat, past 
the slopes of Mount Pagus and away in the hills. Turk¬ 
ish peasants riding on donkeys or in ox wagons jogged 
along the dusty tracks. We passed Turkish cemeteries 
with tombstones leaning at every angle below tall, black 
cypress trees, and looking back, saw the brown roofs 

316 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

of Smyrna below, as in a panorama under the hot sun 
which made the gulf like molten metal. 

In the country we lost touch with the Western world. 
It was Asia, with the smell and color and silence of the 
East. A camel caravan moved slowly in the valley, like 
a picture in “The Arabian Nights.” But at Boudja, and 
later at Bournabat, we were astonished to see English- 
looking girls in English summer frocks, carrying tennis 
racquets, and appearing as though they had just left 
Surbiton. These two villages were inhabited by British 
merchants who had been long settled there as traders in 
Oriental carpets, spices, raisins, dates, and the mer¬ 
chandise of the East. We called on one of them at 
Bournabat, and I rubbed my eyes when, with Asia Minor 
at the gate, we drove up to a house that might have been 
transplanted from Clapham Park in the early Victorian 
period, when Cubitt was building for a rich middle class. 

The house was furnished like that, except for some 
bearskins and hunting trophies, and the two old ladies 
and one old gentleman who gave us tea might have been 
transported on a magic carpet from a tea party in the 
time of the Newcomes. We had toasted muffins, and 
the stouter of the two old ladies (who wore a little lace 
cap and sat stiffly against an antimacassar, in a chintz- 
covered chair) asked whether we would take one or two 
lumps of sugar with our tea. Tony, who was beginning 
to feel an exile from civilization, beamed with happiness 
at this English life again. 

The old gentleman had been the greatest trader in 
Asia Minor, and in his younger days had hunted with 
Turkish peasants in the mountains. He loved the Turk 
still, though he deplored the cruelties they had done to 
the Christian populations in the war. For the Greeks 
he had pity, and dreadful forebodings. He knew some¬ 
thing of what was happening behind the Turkish lines, 
with Mustapha Kemal. There would be no peace until 

317 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

they had Smyrna back again. The Greeks had claimed 
too much. Venizelos had lost his head. Lloyd George 
—The old man sighed, and fell into a gloomy silence. 
“Tm afraid of the future,” he said, presently. “Nobody 
will listen to my advice. The Greeks think I am pro- 
Turk. What I want Is a just peace, and above all peace. 
This Is only an armed truce.” He told me many things 
about the situation which filled me with uneasiness. I 
promised to see him again, but after a few days we left 
Smyrna for Athens. 

We traveled In a little steam yacht which had once 
been Vanderbilt’s and now was a Greek passenger ship, 
called Polikos, It was crowded with Greek officers. In 
elegant uniforms, and very martial-looking until a certain 
hour of the evening. The passage began In a wonderful 
calm, and after darkness there were groups of singing 
folk of different nationalities, as on that other ship, but 
presently a terrific storm broke upon us, and the singing 
ceased, and the Polikos was a ship of sick and sorry 
people. 

Tony and I crept to our bunks in a big crowded cabin, 
and the Greek officers in the other bunks were frightfully 
and outrageously Ill. Early next morning their martial 
appearance had gone and they were the disheveled wrecks 
of men. Tony, with extreme heroism, staggered to the 
saloon and ordered ham and eggs, but thought better of 
it before they came, and took to his bunk again, below 
mine which I, less brave, had never left. We were glad 
to reach Athens without shipwreck. 

We had a week of joy there, in dazzling sunshine, and 
wandered about the ruins of the Acropolis and touched 
old stones with reverence,-and sipped rose-tinted Ices In the 
King’s Gardens, and saw Greek boys throwing the discus 
in the very arena where the games were played In the 
Golden Age, and tried to remember odd scraps of classical 
knowledge, to recall the beauty of the Gods and the wls- 

318 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

dom of the poets. All that need not be told, but it was 
as pro-Greeks that we returned to England, and with 
memories which made us understand more sharply the 
tragedy of that defeat when the Cross went down before 
the Crescent, and the horror happened in Smyrna, and 
all the world held its breath when Constantinople was 
threatened with the same fate. 






319 


XXIV 


I N October of 1921 I went to Russia for the purpose 
of making a report on the Famine to the Imperial 
Relief Fund. 

Much as I disliked the idea of seeing the grisly vision 
of Famine after so many experiences of war and its effects, 
I felt that it was an inescapable duty to accept the invita¬ 
tion made to me. I was also drawn by a strong desire 
to see the conditions of Russia, outside as well as inside 
the famine area, and to get first-hand knowledge of the 
system of Bolshevism which was a terror to the majority 
in Europe, with some secret attraction, holy or unholy, 
among men and women of revolutionary or “advanced” 
views. 

It was impossible to know the truth from newspaper 
reading. Stories of Russian atrocities and horrors ar¬ 
rived from Riga, Helsingfors and other cities on the 
border of the Soviet Republic, and were denied by other 
correspondents. Knowing the way in which “atrocities” 
had been manufactured in time of war, by every nation, 
I disbelieved all I read about Russia circulated by the 
“White” propaganda department, while doubting every¬ 
thing which came from “Red” sources. I think that was 
a general attitude of mind among unprejudiced people. 

Even with regard to the Famine it was impossible to 
get near the truth by newspaper accounts. The Daily 
Mail said the tales of famine were vastly exaggerated. 
The Daily Express said there was no famine at all. The 
Morning Post suggested that it was a simple scheme for 
deluding Western nations in order to feed the Red Army. 
I wanted to know, and promised to find out and report 

320 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

impartially to the Imperial Relief Fund. The Daily 
Chronicle agreed to publish a number of articles written 
after my return from Russia (in order to avoid censor¬ 
ship), and I arranged to send an account to The Review 
of Reviewsj of which I was the rather nominal editor. 

A journalist friend of mine named Leonard Spray 
was also under instructions from The Daily Chronicle to 
go to Russia, for another line of inquiry, and much to 
my delight promised to wait for me in Berlin so that we 
could travel together. It would make a great difference 
having a companion on that adventure, for I confess that 
I hate the lonely trail. 

It was a question of waiting for passports from the 
Soviet Foreign Office in Moscow. I had applied to the 
Russian Trade Mission in London and was recom¬ 
mended by an assistant to Krassin, an intelligent and 
well-educated young Russian who professed devoted ad¬ 
herence to Communism while doing himself remarkably 
well, I thought, with all^the material pleasures of capi¬ 
talistic luxury. After a couple of weeks my credentials 
arrived, my passport was indorsed with the stamp of 
the Soviet Republic, and I had in this way a talisman 
which would open the gate of Red Russia and let me enter 
the heart of its mystery. To some of my friends it 
seemed the free admission to a tiger’s cage. 

In Berlin I was advised to buy blankets, cooking uten¬ 
sils, as much food as I could carry, and illimitable quan¬ 
tities of insect powder. I took this advice, and with 
Leonard Spray and a very useful lady who understood 
the German ways of shopping, we bought this outfit, re¬ 
markably cheap, reckoning in German marks which were 
then not quite 4,000 to the English pound. 

Among other items we acquired an enormous Dutch 
cheese, round and red, which we wrapped up in a towel. 
It became our most precious possession, and, as I may 
tell later, came to an honorable and joyous end. A 

321 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

quantity of solid alcohol in tins somewhat in the style 
of the “Tommy’s Cooker” also bulged out our bags and 
were an immense boon by enabling us to heat up food 
and drink on our Russian journey. 

Spray and I spent two solid days obtaining visas in 
Berlin for all the countries through which we had to pass 
on our way to the Russian frontier by way of Riga—those 
new Baltic States created at Versailles. 

Our journey to Riga was half a nightmare and half a 
farce, and Spray called our train the “Get in and Get out 
Express.” We generally arrived at a new frontier in the 
dead of night or in the early hours of dawn, after fitful 
sleep. Then we were awakened by armed guards demand¬ 
ing to see our visa for each side of the “Danzig corridor” 
for Lithuania, Esthonia, and Latvia. 

At Eydtkiihnen, in East Prussia, we had a six-hours’ 
wait and were able to see something of the Russian in¬ 
vasion and Germany’s “devastated region” which had 
been the greatest cause of terror to the German mind when 
the “Russian steam roller” first began to roll forward 
before its subsequent retreat. Russian cavalry had done 
a lot of damage—the Germans had plenty of atrocity 
stories to set beside those of Alost and Louvain—and we 
saw even at that late date, so long after those early days 
of war, the ruins of burnt-out farms and shell-wrecked 
houses. But not many. German industry had been 
quick at work, and Eydtkiihnen was built up like a model 
town, with red-tiled roofs not yet toned down by weather, 
and shop windows just exhibiting their first stocks. 

As we passed through the new Baltic States—Lith¬ 
uania, Esthonia, Latvia—I had an impression that the 
old British Armies of khaki men had been transferred to 
those far countries. At every station there was a crowd 
of soldiers, all of them clad in unmistakable khaki from 
British stores, but made into misfits for bearded, or un¬ 
shaven, portly or slouchy men who looked—many of 

322 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

them—like the old Contemptibles after years of foreign 
exile and moral degeneration. Yet It would be unfair to 
say they were all like that, for these Baltic peasants were 
sturdy fellows enough, and, I should say, hard fighting 
men. 

In Riga we put up for three or four days, waiting for a 
train into Russia and permission from Soviet representa¬ 
tives in that city to cross the Russian frontier. In spite of 
our visas from headquarters, those Riga Bolsheviks were 
extremely Insolent and put up a blank wall of indifference 
to our requests for railway facilities. There seemed to 
be no chance of a place in any train, and very little chance 
of a train. 

Spray and I kicked our heels about in the little old city, 
very German in its character, which seemed in a state of 
stagnation and creeping paralysis. In its once busy port 
we saw no ship but a vessel carrying a cargo of apples 
which it unloaded on the quayside. The restaurants were 
almost deserted, and we drank little glasses of Schnapps 
In solitary cafes. After midnight there was the awaken¬ 
ing of a squalid night life and we watched the Riga mani¬ 
festation of the fox-trot mania, and an imitation of the 
Friedrichstrasse JVein Stuhe, with a fair amount of amuse¬ 
ment on my part because of the strange types here In a 
city filled with Russian exiles, Letts, Poles, Germans, 
Swedes, Lithuanians, and all variety of northern races. 
But It was not Russia, which we had come to see. 

I doubt whether we should ever have set foot In Russia 
if It had not been for the American Relief Administration 
established In Riga and just beginning to send food sup¬ 
plied Into the famine area. The chief of the Riga head¬ 
quarters promised us two places on the next food train 
going to Moscow, and broke through all formalities by 
reckoning us as members of his staff. 

“What about the Famine?” I asked, and he said, 
“There’s a Famine all right, with a capital F.” 

323 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

It was a queer journey from Riga to Moscow—un¬ 
forgotten by me. I have put the spirit of it, as indeed of 
all my experience in Russia, into my novel “The Middle 
of the Road,” under a thin guise of fiction, with some 
imaginary characters. The train started at night, and 
Spray and I, with our baggage carried by Lettish porters, 
stumbled along unlit rail tracks to a long train in absolute 
darkness, except in a few carriages where candles, stuck 
in their own grease, burned dimly on the window ledges. 
In the corridor was a seething mass of Lettish and Rus¬ 
sian porters, laden with the enormous baggage of Russian, 
British, German, American, and other couriers, who 
shouted at them in various languages. A party of young 
American clerks and typists for the central headquarters 
in Moscow of the American Relief Administration (al¬ 
ways known as the A.R.A., or even, shorter, as “Ara”) 
smoked cigarettes, cursed because of the darkness and 
filth and stench and lack of space for their baggage, and 
between their curses sang ragtime choruses. 

Violent action and terrific language in the American 
accent, on the part of a large-sized man, cleared the cor¬ 
ridor somewhat, and I met, for the first time, a cheery 
young giant whom I have put into my novel as “Cherry of 
Lynchburg, U.S.A.,” but who is really H. J. Fink, 
courier, at that time, to the A.R.A. He is known as 
“The Milk-fed Boy” by his fellow-travelers, and but for 
his enormous good nature, his mixture of ferocity and 
joviality with obstructive Bolsheviks, his genial command 
of the whole “outfit” from the ^^provodniks*^ or guards 
to the engine drivers, the journey would have been more 
intolerable than we found it. I take off my hat, meta¬ 
phorically, to the “Milk-fed Boy.” 

Our blankets were uncommonly valuable in the filthy 
carriage of bare boards with wooden bunks which I 
shared with Spray. By rigging up a “gadget” of straps 
strung across the carriage, we were able to use our solid 

324 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

alcohol for heating up soups and beans, with only a fifty- 
per-cent chance of setting the bunks on fire. We went 
easy on the red Dutch cheese, remembering that we might 
have greater need of it in times to come. 

The insect powder was extraordinarily good, for the 
insects, which came out of their lairs as soon as the train 
warmed up. They throve on it. It sharpened their 
appetite for Leonard Spray, who suffered exceedingly. 
Afterward, all through Russia, he was a victim of these 
creatures who at the first sight of him leapt upon him joy¬ 
ously. By some thinness of blood, or anti-insect tincture 
—I strongly suspect the nicotine of innumerable “gas¬ 
pers”—I was wonderfully immune, and Russian lice had 
no use for me, though I encountered them everywhere, 
for Russia is their stronghold as carriers of typhus, with 
which the people were stricken in every city and village. 

We saw Red soldiers for the first time at Sebesh, the 
Russian frontier, anaemic-looking lads, wearing long gray 
overcoats and gray hoods, rising to a point like Assyrian 
helmets, with the Red Star of the Soviet Republic above 
the peak. Here at Sebesh also we saw the first trainload 
of refugees from the famine area, whom we met in hordes 
throughout our journey. They were Letts, and in a bad 
state, after being three months on the way, in closed cattle 
trucks. Many were typhus-stricken. All were weak and 
wan-looking, except some of the children, who had a 
sturdy look in their ragged sheepskins. A man spoke to 
me in English, with an American accent. He had come 
from Ufa, three thousand miles away, and spoke tragic 
words about the people there. They were starving, and 
near death. 

Our train crawled forward through flat, desolate coun¬ 
try. The people we saw at wayside stations looked 
wretched and gloomy. A light snow lay on the ground, 
and the woods were black against it, and grim. Many 
times our engine panted and then stopped for lack of 

325 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

fuel. We waited while fresh timber was piled on. The 
journey seemed interminable but for the laughter of the 
“Milk-fed Boy,” and tales of Russian tragedy by Mr. 
Wilton, the King’s messenger, who had a queer red glint 
in his eyes, and a suppressed passion beneath his quiet 
and charming grace of manner, when he spoke of all that 
agony in the country he loved. So at last we reached 
Moscow, and in a little while came to know its way of 
life. 

The fantastic aspect of the city, and especially at its 
heart by the palace of the Kremlin, seemed to me as wild 
as an Oriental nightmare in a hasheesh dream, with 
golden pear-shaped domes, and tall towers, and high walls 
with fan-shaped battlements, and step flights of steps 
leading to walled walks, and old narrow gateways 
guarded by Red soldiers. There was something sinister 
as well as splendid* in that vast fortress palace which is 
a city within a city. It seemed to tell of ancient bar¬ 
barities. There was a spirit of evil about its very walls, 
I thought. Perhaps vague memories of Russian history 
were sharpened by the knowledge that somewhere within 
those walls was the brooding mind of Lenin, whose genius 
had drowned Russia in blood and tears, if all one heard, 
or a thousandth part of it, were true. 

I entered the Kremlin one day on a visit to Radek— 
whose name means “scoundrel”—and was arrested three 
times at the guard posts before reaching the rooms where 
the chief propaganda agent of Soviet Russia lived with 
his wife and child, in simple domesticity, while he pulled 
wires in all parts of the world to stir up revolution, or 
any kind of trouble. Smiling through his spectacles, this 
man who looked a cross between an ancient mariner and 
a German poet, with a fringe of reddish beard round his 
face, was disarmingly frank and cynical on the subject of 
Anglo-Russian relations, and had a profound and inti¬ 
mate knowledge of foreign politics which startled me. 

326 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

He knew more than I did about the secret intrigues in 
England and France. 

^ Leonard Spray and I were billeted In a house imme¬ 
diately opposite the Kremlin along an embankment of the 
river called the Sophieskaya. It was, indeed, more than 
a house, being the palace of a pre-war monopolist in sugar, 
and most handsomely furnished in the French Empire 
style, with elegant salons on whose walls hung some 
valuable pictures, among which I remember a Corot, and 
a Greuze. 

We arrived In the dark, after a visit to the Soviet 
Foreign Office and an Interview with a melancholy, soft- 
spoken, cross-eyed Jew, by name Weinstein, who was In 
charge of foreign visitors and correspondents. A pretty 
Lettish girl, shuffling along In bedroom slippers, opened 
the door to us, and locked us In afterward. Then the 
housekeeper, a tall Swede who spoke a little of all lan¬ 
guages, conducted us up a noble stairway, richly carved, 
to our bedroom, which was an Immense gilded salon with¬ 
out a bed. This lack of sleeping accommodation was 
remedied by four Red soldiers who came staggering In 
under bits of an enormous four-poster which they fixed up 
in a corner of the room. Spray took possession of it, 
and I slept on a broad divan. 

It was bitterly cold, and we were almost frozen to 
death. I shall never forget how Spray used to wrap 
himself up In the blankets to the top of his head, like an 
Eskimo in his sleeping bag. That house was full of 
strange people whom we used to pass in the corridors, 
including a deputation of Chinese Mandarins from the 
Far Eastern Republic, and a mission of Turks from An¬ 
gora. One evening while we were there, Tchicherin, the 
Foreign Minister, with whom I had a long Interview, 
gave a banquet on the third anniversary of the Soviet 
Republic to all the missions represented In Moscow. It 
was a very handsome affair. All the leading Bolsheviks 

327 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

were in evening dress, the Chinese Mandarins wore cloth 
of gold, wine flowed copiously, and watching from the 
doorway of my bedroom, I wondered what had happened 
to Bolshevism and Communism, and what equality there 
was between those well-fed, elegantly dressed gentlemen, 
dining richly in their noble rooms, and those millions of 
starving peasants who were waiting for death, and dying, 
in the Volga valley, or even the population of Moscow 
itself, not starving altogether, but pinched, and half 
hungry in their ragged sheepskins. 

Spray and I explored the life of Moscow, freely, as I 
must admit, for never once were we aware of any deliber¬ 
ate espionage about us, though often there were watchful 
eyes. 

We had arrived in time to witness a complete reversal 
of the Communistic system by what Lenin called the “New 
Economic Laws.” On October 17, 1921, while we were 
there, Lenin made an historic speech in which he ad¬ 
mitted, with amazing frankness, the complete breakdown 
of the Communistic way of life which he had imposed 
'upon the people. He explained, with a kind of vigorous 
brutality of speech, that owing to the hostility and igno¬ 
rance of the peasants, who resisted the requisition of their 
food stuffs, and the failure of world revolution which 
prevented any international trade with Russia, industry 
had disintegrated, factories were abandoned, transport 
had broken down, and the system of rationing which had 
been in force in the cities, could no longer be maintained. 

The cardinal theory of Communism was that in return 
for service to the State, every individual in the State 
received equal rations of food, clothes, education, and 
amusements. That was the ideal, but it could no longer 
be fulfilled, for the causes given. 

“We have suffered a severe defeat on the economic 
front,” said Lenin. “Our only safety lies in a rapid re¬ 
treat upon prepared positions.” 

328 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

He then outlined the “New Economic Laws,” which 
abolished the rationing system, re-established the use of 
money, permitted “private trading” which had been the 
unpardonable crime, and even invited the introduction of 
foreign capital. 

We saw the Immediate, though gradual and tentative 
effect of this reversal of policy. It was visible In the 
market places of Moscow, where peasants freely sold 
the produce of their farms under the eyes of Red soldiers 
who previously would have seized and flung them into 
prison for trading In that way. 

Among these peasants stood long lines of men and 
women who as I saw at a glance were people of the old 
regime—aristocrats and Intellectuals. Shabby as most of 
them were, haggard and wan, unshaven and unwashed 
(how could they wash without soap?), their faces, and 
above all their eyes, betrayed them. They stood, those 
ladles and gentlemen of Imperial Russia, holding out little 
articles which they had saved or hidden during the time 
of revolution. The women carried their underclothing, 
or their fur coats, tippets, and caps, embroidered linen, 
old shoes and boots, their engagement rings, brooches, 
household ornaments. The men—mostly old fellows— 
held out woollen vests, socks, pipes, rugs, books, many 
odds and ends of their ancient life. Who bought these 
things I could never tell, though I saw peasant women 
and old soldiers fingering them, and asking the price, and 
generally shrugging their shoulders and walking away. 

I spoke to some of the ladles there In French or Ger¬ 
man, and at first they were very much afraid and would 
not answer, or left the market place Immediately, lest 
this were some police trap which would endanger their 
liberty or life. Almost all of them, as I found after¬ 
ward, had been Imprisoned for doing secretly the very 
thing which they now dared to do In the open market 
place, but with trembling fear at first. 

329 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

In the same way, timidly, with nervous foreboding, 
little groups of families or friends opened a few shops in 
the Arbat, furnishing them with relics of their old homes, 
and stocking them with a strange assortment of goods. 

Two restaurants opened, one called “The English 
Restaurant,” where Spray and I used to dine, almost 
alone, except for a Red Commissioner or two who came 
in for coffee and a secret inspection, and now and then a 
few ladies, furtively, for a plate of soup. The restaurant 
keepers were of good family and ancient rank. The lady 
spoke English and French, and told me many tales of 
her tragic life during the years of revolution. Behind 
the bar was a pretty, smiling girl of sixteen or so, amazed 
and delighted to see two English customers. Her father, 
dressed like a seafaring man, was charming in his courtesy 
to us, but always afraid. 

Even now I dare not write too freely about the people 
we met by hazard, or by introduction, lest any words of 
mine should do them harm. There was one family, of 
noble blood, who lived in two squalid rooms divided by 
a curtain from a public corridor. The two daughters had 
one pair of decent boots between them. They took turns 
to go out “visiting” at the British Mission which gave 
Sunday afternoon receptions to a little group of ladies, 
and taught them the fox trot and two step and other 
dances which had become a mania in many Western 
nations, but were utterly unknown in Russia, cut off from 
all the world. 

The old gentleman their father, and their charming 
mother, had dirty hands. There was no soap in Russia, 
and in those rooms no chance of hot water, except for 
tea. I marveled at their courage (though the old man 
wept a little), and at the courage of all those people of 
the old regime, who were living in direst poverty, in 
perpetual fear of prison, or worse than that. They saw 
the ruin of Russia, but still had hope that out of all that 

330 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

agony, and all their tears, some new hope would dawn 
for the country they loved. So many people told me, 
and among them one bedridden lady, near to death, I 
think, who said that there would be a new and nobler 
Russia born out of all this terror and tribulation. 

Moscow was not starving to death, though many in it 
were always hungry. When the American Relief Admin¬ 
istration opened a soup kitchen in the famous old res¬ 
taurant, The Hermitage, thousands of children came to 
be fed, but, on the whole, they were not famine-stricken 
—only underfed and uncertain of the next day’s meal. 

With its dilapidated houses, many of them wrecked by 
gunfire in the first days of the revolution, Moscow had- 
a melancholy look, and few of its people, outside the 
Commissar and Soviet official class had any margin be¬ 
yond the barest needs of life. But the people in the mass 
looked healthy, and they were not deprived of all light 
and beauty in life. The opera, and two or three theaters 
were open, crowded every night by the “proletariat” in 
working clothes. In the Imperial box of the opera, with 
its eagles covered under the Red Flag, sat a group of 
mechanics with their wives, and between the acts the foyer 
was crowded with what looked like the “lower middle 
class,” as we should see them in some music hall on the 
Surrey side of London. The opera and the ballet were 
as beautiful as in the old days, maintaining their historic 
traditions, though all else had gone in Russia, and it was 
strange to see this stage splendor in a Republic of ruin. 

. . . But not yet had I seen the famine. 

I came closer to the effects of famine in Petrograd. 
That city, grim but magnificent as I saw it under heavy 
snow, had a sinister and tragic look. During the war its 
population had been 3,000,000 and more. When Spray 
and I walked along the Nevski Prospekt, where all the 
shops but six or seven were barricaded with wooden 
planks, there were only 750,000 people in the whole of 

331 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

this great city. Palaces, Government offices, great banks, 
city offices, huge blocks of buildings, were uninhabited and 
unlighted. Many of those who had been government 
officials, rich merchants, factory owners, were shoveling 
snow upon the streets, or dragging loads of wood on 
sledges over the slippery roads. They wore bowler hats, 
black coats with ragged collars of astrachan, the clothes 
of a “genteel’ world that had gone down into the great 
gulfs of revolution. 

At every street corner were men and women selling 
cigarettes. Some of those women, and one I especially 
remember, were thinly clad, shivering in the biting wind, 
and obviously starved. The very look of them made me 
shiver in my soul. 

In Petrograd I went to a home for refugees from the 
famine region. All round the city were great camps of 
these people, who had come in a tide of flight—hundreds 
of thousands—when the harvest of 1921 was burnt as 
black as that of 1920 in the awful drought. Four thou¬ 
sand or so were in one of the old Imperial barracks, and 
they had come three thousand miles to reach this refuge 
at the end of their journey. Outside, in Petrograd, there 
was a hard, grim frost. In these bare whitewashed rooms 
there was no heat, for lack of fuel, and men, women and 
children lay about in heaps, huddled together in their 
sheepskins for human warmth, tormented by vermin, 
fever-stricken, weak. Too weak to stand, some of them, 
even to take their place in line for the daily ration of 
potato soup. A doctor there took us round. He pointed 
to those with typhus, and said, “There’s no hope for 
them. They’ll be dead to-morrow or next day.” 

When we crossed a courtyard, he stopped a moment to 
thrust back a heavy door. “Our morgue,” he said. 
“Three-days’ dead.” Inside was a pile of dead bodies, 
men, women and children, flung one on top of the other 
like rubbish for the refuse heap. Hands and legs ob- 

332 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

truded from the mass of corruption. It was the end of 
their journey. 

But the opera was very brilliant in Petrograd, some 
distance from that heap of mud-colored corpses. I went 
to the Marinsky theater and heard “Carmen.” It was 
marvelously staged, admirably sung, and there was a 
packed audience of “trade unionists,” as I was told, on 
free tickets, but as everybody in Russia had to belong to 
a trade union or die, it did not specify the character of 
the people closely. I think most of them were of the 
clerical class, with a few mechanics. On the way back 
we followed a party of young men and women walking 
in snow boots and wrapped to their ears in ragged furs 
or woollen shawls. They were laughing gayly. Their 
voices rang out on the still frosty air under the steely 
glint of stars. ... So there were still people who could 
laugh and make love in Russia! 

How did they live, these people? I never could find 
out in actual detail. Russian money meant nothing to 
me. When I changed ten pounds in Moscow, I received 
four big bundles of notes, containing three million roubles. 
My first experience with the purchasing power of this 
money was when I wanted to buy a pair of boots in the 
market place. They were good top boots, splendid look¬ 
ing for snow and mud, but when I was asked one million 
roubles, I was abashed. Yet, after all, it was not much 
in English money. But what did it mean to those 
Russians? 

I found out that the average wage for a mechanic, or 
Soviet official, or University professor, was 150,000 
roubles a month. That sounded well until I came up 
against those boots, and later discovered that in Petro¬ 
grad a pound of bread cost 80,000 roubles, a pound of 
tea 120,000 roubles, ten cigarettes 60,000 roubles. How, 
then, could any human soul live on 150,000 roubles a 
month? I asked many of them, and some said, “We 

333 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

don’t live. We die,” but others said, “We supplement 
our wages by speculation.” For some time I was puzzled 
by that word speculation, until I found that it meant 
bartering. Secretly, and at risk of imprisonment or 
death, until the “New Economic Laws,” there was a 
general system of exchange in goods. A man with a 
second pair of boots exchanged them for a sack of 
potatoes, kept some and bartered the others for tea, or 
bread, or meat, kept some of that, and bartered the 
rest for a woollen vest, a fur waistcoat, or a tin of 
sardines, smuggled in from Riga. And so on, in a highly 
complicated, difficult and dangerous system of “under¬ 
ground trade.” But in spite of “speculation,” life was 
hard, and almost impossible for elderly folk, and the 
sick, and frail women. For years hundreds of thousands 
of them had lived on bread and tea and small rations of 
soused herrings and millet seed. Now there were no 
rations, but still bread and tea, for those who had the 
money. 

“What do you think of Bolshevism?” asked Spray one 
night in the Sugar king’s palace. We lay in bed, with 
only our mouths and noses out. 

I asked him three questions in return. Was there 
liberty in Russia? Was there equality? Was there a 
higher type of civilization and human happiness here than 
in Western Europe, or any chance of it? I asked the 
questions without prejudice, and we discussed them be¬ 
tween the low divan and the four-poster bed, in that great 
gilded salon opposite the Kremlin, where, in some secret 
room, Lenin sat that night scheming out some way of 
saving Russia from the fate into which he had led it, to 
test his theory of the Communistic state. 

We could find no liberty. The two chief papers pub¬ 
lished— Pravda, and Izvestia —were propaganda sheets 
under Government control. There was no freedom of 
speech or opinion. There was no equality, even of misery 

334 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

—surely the first test of the Communistic state. Between 
the Soviet Commissars, even the “trade-union” audience 
of the Marinsky theater, and the peasants, the workers, 
the underfed masses, there was a gulf as wide as between 
the profiteers and unemployed of England, wide though 
lower down the scale of life on both sides. Civilization, 
human happiness? Well, there was the Marinsky theater, 
and those laughing boys and girls. Human nature 
adapted itself marvelously to the hardest conditions of 
life. Perhaps there were happy people In Russia, but for 
the most part. Spray and I had met only those who told 
us tragic tales, of imprisonings, executions, deaths, misery. 

When we left Moscow and traveled across Russia to 
Kazan, and took a boat down the Volga, and sledges 
across the snow fields to the villages where Famine dwelt, 
we left human happiness behind us and saw nothing but 
suffering and despair, hunger and pestilence. 

It was again due to the American Relief Administra¬ 
tion that we were able to make that journey. Colonel 
Haskell, chief of the A.R.A., and a man of indomitable 
energy. Iron will power, and exquisite courtesy, invited 
Spray and myself to join his own party which was going 
to Kazan on a tour of Inspection under his command, and 
after that he would provide us with a ship for the Volga 
voyage. Without that immense help of the A.R.A., all- 
powerful in Russia because It was the one source of hope 
in the famine region, I should have seen nothing outside 
Moscow. It was they who controlled the railways, got 
the trains to move, and forced officials to work. 

It was a four-days’ journey to Kazan. The carriages 
were verminous, and Spray was tortured again—and we 
crawled slowly through the dreary woods and plains. 
Colonel Haskell and his staff carried good rations which 
they shared with us, and at night, when our darkness was 
Illumined by candlelight, we played poker for Russian 
roubles, gambling wildly, as it seemed. In thousands of 

335 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

roubles, but losing or winning no more than a few 
shillings. 

One man on board impressed me beyond words. It 
was Governor Goodrich of Indiana, who had come to 
report to Washington on the agricultural conditions and 
prospects of Russia, and the truth about the Famine. He 
was an elderly man with the fresh complexion of a new¬ 
born babe, and a powerful clear-cut face, wonderfully 
softened by the look of benevolence in his eyes and the 
whimsical smile about his lips. “Governor Jem” he used 
to be called in Indiana, and he must have been a gallant 
fellow in his youth, before he became lame in one leg. 
Now he had come as a knight-errant to Russia, for the 
rescue of a stricken people. I think no man of greater 
quality ever went into Russia, or ever came out of it, 
and it was due not a little to his report (which he allowed 
me to read) that the Government of the United States, 
acting through the American Relief Association, fed ten 
million Russians every day in the famine regions, and 
saved that number from certain death by hunger or 
disease. 

Kazan lay under a heavy mantle of snow. It was now 
the capital of the “Tartar Republic,” a province of Soviet 
Russia, on the edge of the richest grain-growing districts 
of the Volga valley, where now there was no grain. It 
was a garden city, with many great houses where the 
nobles of Imperial Russia had taken their pleasure in 
summer months, now inhabited by misery, hunger, and 
disease. 

There were forty homes here for abandoned children 
—abandoned not by the cruelty of their parents but by 
their love, because they could not'bear to see their little 
ones wailing over empty platters. I went into a number 
of them, and they were all alike in general character. 
In one of them were fifteen hundred children, naked, or 
merely clothed in little ragged shirts. Their clothes had 

336 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

been burnt because of the lice in them, which spread 
typhus fever. There were no other clothes to replace 
their ragged old sheepskins and woollen garments. There 
was no heat in the rooms, for lack of fuel. There was 
no furniture. On the bare boards they huddled together, 
these little wizened things, with deep, sunken eyes, and 
tight-drawn skin, like little bald-headed monkeys. There 
were many homes like that, and worse than that, because 
many of the children were dying, and the rooms reeked 
with their fever, and the very doorposts crawled with 
lice. 

I went into the hospitals, and they were dreadful. 
Because there was no fuel for heat, these people, stricken 
with typhus, dysentery, all manner of hunger diseases, 
were huddled together in unventilated wards for human 
warmth. Many of the beds had been burnt for fuel and 
most of them lay on mattresses or the bare boards. Those 
who had beds lay four together, two one way and two 
the other. There were no medicines, no anaesthetics, no 
soap, no dressings. The nurses were starving, and dying 
of the diseases they could not cure. They came clamor¬ 
ing round the doctor of the A R.A. with whom I went, 
begging for food in a wild animal way which made his 
heart go sick. 

•'But there was an opera, even in Kazan! It was true 
that the stench of it was pretty bad, and that its audience 
tightened their belts from time to time in lieu of supper, 
but Madam Butterfly delighted them, they thrilled to the 
“Carmen” of a Persian prima donna. 

One night the ladies and gentlemen of the opera in¬ 
vaded the headquarters of the A.R.A. after midnight. 
They were hungry, and made no secret about it. So the 
young Americans of the Kazan headquarters brewed 
cocoa in a saucepan, with the help of one of the ladies, 
and scraped up some bully beef and beans and a loaf or 
two and some apples, and odds and ends. Not much for 

337 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

a banquet! Spray and I whispered together! I fetched 
out the last hunk of our round red cheese. It was re¬ 
ceived with a chorus of approval. It died a sacrificial 
death in the cause of art and beauty. The Persian prima 
donna had an insatiable appetite. . . . Out in the streets 
of Kazan were starving wanderers, and in the station lay 
the latest of the abandoned children. 

The last boat to go down the Volga before the ice came 
was put under command of the press representative of 
the A.R.A., my good friend Murphy, a most kind and 
generous-hearted soul. Spray and I were the only pas¬ 
sengers. We three explored the ship before she left the 
quayside. She had been a rescue ship for the fugitives 
from famine, and was in a noisome state. We dared not 
linger in the sleeping cabins. The very washbasins were 
crawling. That night Murphy and I slept on the table 
in the dining saloon—the safest place. Spray gave him¬ 
self up for lost and curled up on the floor, where he 
tossed all night. I was cook on that voyage, and did 
rather well with boiled beans and a mess of pottage. We 
went down to Tetiushi, and found ourselves among the 
people of famine. . . . 

After two droughts in successive years, there was no 
harvest of any account. The Red soldiers had requisi¬ 
tioned the peasants’ reserves of grain for rationing the 
cities. Without reserves they had no means of life. The 
Soviet Government had supplied them with seed grain 
for the next harvest, and they had sown it, not expecting 
to reap it. They had also sent, lately, some barges of 
potatoes, but they lay there rotting. To carry them 
to the villages, horses were needed for the sledges, but 
there was no fodder, and the horses were dying, or dead. 
So we discovered the State of Tetiushi. 

By a message from the Prime Minister of the Tartar 
Republic, four horses were found for us, and two sledges, 
after many hours of waiting, and we set out across the 

338 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

snow to the villages. They were very silent when we 
entered. They seemed abandoned. But we saw in one 
or two of their timbered houses little wizened faces 
staring at us from the windows. They were faces like 
those I had seen in the homes for abandoned children, 
monkeylike. We went into the cottages and found there 
peasant families waiting for a visitor who tarried, which 
was Death. 

They showed us the last food they had—if they had 
any left. It was a brownish powder, made of leaves 
ground up and mixed with the husks of grain. Others 
showed us bits of hard stuff like lead. It was a bluish 
clay dug from a hillside called Bitarjisk. It had some 
nutritive value, but it swelled when eaten, and was the 
cause of dreadful agony to children. Peasant women, 
weeping very quietly, showed us their naked children, 
with distended stomachs, the sign of starvation in its 
last stage. From other cottages they came to where we 
stood, crossing themselves at the doorways, in the Rus¬ 
sian way, and then lamenting. 

Handsome Russian peasants, with blue eyes and straw- 
colored beards, struck their breasts with a gesture of 
absolute despair, and said—we had a Russian with us 
who spoke English—that death could not be long de¬ 
layed, for all of them. The last cows had been killed 
for lack of fodder. There was no milk for the children, 
as for a long time there had been no bread. Here and 
there a woman wailed loudly, or grasped my wrist with 
her skinny hand and spoke fiercely, as though I denied 
her food. I remember one cottage in which a whole family 
lay dying, and nearly dead. It was the Famine. . . . 

I will not write more about the horrors here. In many 
articles, and in my novel “The Middle of the Road” I 
have given the picture of it, and the agony of it. 

It is said that two million of these people died. That 
is Nansen’s figures. That twenty million did not die is 

339 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

due to the magnificent work of the A.R.A. and the Save 
the Children Fund who, against all political prejudice 
and for humanity’s sake, achieved a great rescue of these 
stricken folk. As I have said, the A.R.A. alone fed ten 
million people a day in the famine area, and I pay a 
tribute here to the courage and efficiency and devotion of 
those young Americans whose work I saw, and of whose 
friendship I am proud. Our people did less, having less 
means, but it was work well and nobly done in the spirit 
of Christianity kept alight in a dark and cruel world, 
which is this jungle of Europe. 


340 


XXV 


I N the spring of 19195 while the Peace Conference 
was sitting in Paris, I made my first visit to the 
United States, and lectured in many American cities. I 
went there again in 1920 and 1921, and on the third visit 
traveled from New York to San Francisco. 

I regard these American visits as the greatest experi¬ 
ence of my life, apart from the War, and they added 
enormously to the knowledge of world forces and the 
human problem which I had been studying among the 
peoples of Europe. I was, and still remain, convinced 
that the United States will shape, for good or ill—and 
I believe for good—the future destiny of the world, for 
these people, in the mass, have a dynamic energy, a clear- 
cut quality of character, and a power not only of material 
wealth, but of practical idealism, from which an enormous 
impetus may be given to human progress, in the direction 
of the common well-being, international peace, liberty, 
decency, and average prosperity of individual life. 

During those three visits, when I talked with innumer¬ 
able men and women of great intelligence and honesty of 
thought, I was “made wise,” as they call it, to many of 
the darker aspects of American life. I was not uncon¬ 
scious of a strong strain of intolerance; a dangerous gulf 
between the very rich and—not the very poor, there are 
few of those—^but well-paid, speeded-up, ugly-living, dis¬ 
satisfied labor; something rather hysterical in mass emo¬ 
tion when worked up by the wire-pullers and the spell¬ 
binders ; and the noisy, blatant, loud-mouthed boasting 
vulgarity of the mob. I saw the unloveliness of “Main 
Street,” I met “Babbitt” in his club, parlor car, and 

341 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

private house. But though I did not shut my eyes to all 
that, and much more than that—a good deal of it belongs 
to civilization as well as to the United States—I saw also 
the qualities that outweigh these defects, and, in my judg¬ 
ment, contain a great hope for the world. I met, every¬ 
where, numbers of men and women who have what seems 
to me a clean, sane, level-headed outlook on life and its 
problems. They believe in peace, in a good chance for 
the individual, in a decent standard of life for all people, 
in honesty and truth. They are impatient of dirt, how¬ 
ever picturesque, of ruin, however romantic, of hamper¬ 
ing tradition, however ancient. They are, in the mass, 
common-sense, practical, and good-natured folk, who, in 
the business of life, cut formalities and get down to 
the job. 

But behind all that common sense and their practicality, 
they are deeply sentimental, simply and sincerely emo¬ 
tional, quick to respond to any call upon their pity or 
their charity, and when stirred that way, enormously gen¬ 
erous. I agree with General Swinton, the inventor of the 
“Tanks” who, after a tour in the United States, told me, 
with a touch of exaggeration, that he thought the Ameri¬ 
cans, as a nation, were the only idealists left in the world. 
Europe is cynical, remembering too much history, and 
suffering too much disillusionment. The United States, 
looking always to the future, and not much backward to 
the past, is hopeful, confident of human progress, and 
strangely and wonderfully eager to find a philosopher’s 
stone of human happiness, for which we, in Europe, have 
almost abandoned search. 

I think that, as a people, they are more ready than 
any other to do some great work of rescue for humanity 
(I have told how they fed ten million people a day in 
Russia), and to adopt and carry out an ideal on behalf 
of humanity in the way of peace and reconstruction, at 
some personal sacrifice to themselves. That is possible 

342 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

at least in the United States, and it may almost be said 
that it is impossible in any other nation. 

As a personal experience, my first visit to the United 
States was exciting and rather overwhelming, in an ex¬ 
tremely pleasant way, except for my extreme nervousness. 
For the first time in my life I was made to believe (except 
for secret doubts and a sense of humor) that I was a 
person of some importance. By good fortune, of which 
I was not aware until my arrival in New York, I had 
gained the good opinion, and almost personal popularity, 
of an immense American public from coast to coast. I 
do not minimize the pleasure of that, the real joy of it, 
for there is no reward in the world so good to a man 
who for years has been an obscure writer, as to realize 
at last that his words have been read and remembered, 
with emotion, by millions of fellow mortals, almost by a 
whole nation—and this had happened to me. It hap¬ 
pened by the great luck that since the entry of the United 
States into the War my daily dispatches from the West¬ 
ern front had been published in The New York Times^ 
and a syndicate of newspapers covering the whole coun¬ 
try. Day after day during those years of enormous 
history, I appeared with the grape fruit and the cereal 
at millions of American breakfast tables, and because of 
the things I had to tell, and perhaps, a little, the way in 
which I told them (I tried to give the picture and the 
pity of the things I saw), I got home to the bosom and 
business (to use Francis Bacon’s words) of the American 
merchant, lawyer, and city man, to the lady whom he 
provides with a Packard or a Ford (according to his 
rung on the social ladder) and to the bright young thing 
who is beginning to take an interest in the drama of life 
outside her dancing school or her college rooms. My 
articles were read on lonely farms, in tenement houses, 
by Irish servant girls, Slav foundry workers, German 
metal workers, clerks and telephone girls, as well as by 

343 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

all manner of folk in Fifth Avenue, Riverside Drive, and 
the Main Street of many towns. I am not making a boast 
of that, for if I had written like an archangel instead of 
like a war correspondent (there’s a difference), I should 
not have secured those readers unless The New York 
Times and its syndicate had stepped in where angels fear 
to tread—in Chicago, and other American cities. But 
it was my luck, and, as I say, pleasant and encouraging. 

People wanted to see the fellow whose name had be¬ 
come familiar to them over the breakfast table. They 
wanted to see what manner of man he was (and some 
were disappointed) ; they wanted to know if he could 
speak as he wrote (and presently they knew he didn’t) : 
they wanted to pay back by hospitality, by booking seats 
for the theaters, by friendly words afterward, for some 
of the things he had written at a time when they had 
wanted to know. 

One of the first little thrills I had was when I stood 
at the desk of the Vanderbilt hotel, ten minutes after 
getting away from the dockside, where scores of telegrams 
were waiting for me, inviting me to speak at all sorts of 
places with strange and alarming names, and having 
picked up the receiver in answer to the urgent calls, heard 
the voice of a telephone girl saying, “Welcome to our 
city, Philip Gibbs! . . . and here’s another call for you.” 
I have always remembered that little human message 
from the girl at the switchboard. 

I was still a journalist, though about to become a lec¬ 
turer, and The New York Times desired me to write a 
series of articles recording—rapidly!—my first impres¬ 
sions of New York. It still seems to me a miracle that 
I was able to do so, for I was caught up by the social 
life of New York like a straw in a whirlpool, and my 
head was dazed by the immensity of the city, by its noise, 
its light, its rush of traffic, its overheated rooms, its news¬ 
paper reporters, its camera men, and, when I staggered 

344 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

to my bedroom for a moment’s respite, by the incessant 
tinkle of the telephone which rang me up from scores of 
addresses in New York city, from Boston, Philadelphia, 
Chicago, the Lord knows where. 

I wrote those articles, blindly, subconsciously, like a 
man in a nightmare, and they came out rather like that, 
with a sort of wild impressionism of confused scenes, 
which seemed to please the American people. 

They were vastly amused, I was told, by one phrase 
which came from my nerve ganglia all quivering with the 
first walk through Broadway at night. I confessed that 
I felt “like a trench cootie under the fire of ten thousand 
guns.” Now a cootie is a louse, as I had lately learnt, 
and that simile tickled my readers to death, as some of 
them said, though it expressed in utter truthfulness the 
terror of my sensation as a traffic dodger down the Great 
White Way. 

But that terror was easily surpassed when I faced for 
the first time an audience in the Carnegie Hall. As I 
drove up with my brother, and saw hundreds of motor 
cars setting down people in evening dress who had come 
to have a look at me (and paid good money for it), 
with the odd chance of hearing something worth while— 
poor dears!—I was cold with fright. My fear increased 
until I was stiff with it when, having shaken hands with 
my brother and received his hearty pat on the shoulder, 
like a man about to go over the top with the odds against 
him, I went through a little door and found myself on a 
large stage, facing a great audience. I was conscious of 
innumerable faces, white shirt fronts, and eyes—eyes— 
eyes, staring at me from the great arena of stalls, and 
from all the galleries up to the roof. As I made my bow, 
my tongue clave, literally, to the roof of my mouth, my 
knees weakened, and I felt (as some one afterward told 
me I looked) as cheap as two cents. 

What frightened me excessively was a sudden move- 

345 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

ment like a tidal wave among all those people. They 
stood up, and I became aware that they were paying me 
a very great honor, but the physical effect of that move¬ 
ment was, for a moment, as though they were all advanc¬ 
ing on me, possibly with intent to kill I 

My chairman was my good and great comrade, Fred¬ 
erick Palmer, the American war correspondent. I am 
told he made a fine introductory speech, but I did not 
hear a word of it, and was only wondering with a sinking 
heart whether I should get through my first few sentences 
before I broke down utterly. It was a fearful thought, 
to make a public fool of myself like that! . . . 

I had one thing in my favor—a strong, far-reaching 
voice, and I had been told to pitch it to the center of the 
top gallery. I know they heard. A young foreigner I 
know—not an American—a most friendly and candid 
soul, told me that he had heard every word, and wished 
he hadn’t. Attracted by the title of a book of mine, “The 
Soul of the War,” he had bought four tickets for himself 
and friends, believing that at last he would hear the inner 
meaning of the war and its madness, in which he had 
found no kind of sense. But when he heard my straight¬ 
forward narrative of what the British Armies had done, 
he sighed deeply, and said, “Sold again!” and tried to 
sleep. My loud, clear-cut sentences hammered into his 
brain, and would not allow him even that consolation. 

That first audience in the Carnegie Hall was immensely 
kind, extraordinarily generous and long-suffering. They 
applauded my stories of British heroism as though it had 
been their own heroes, laughed at my attempts to tell 
Cockney anecdotes, and did not let me know once that I 
was boring them excessively. Some spirit of friendship 
and good will reached up to me and gave me courage. 
Only once did they laugh in the wrong place, and then they 
couldn’t help themselves. It was when for the sixth time 
or more I glanced at my wrist watch and then in a sudden 

346 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

panic that it had stopped and that I had spoken an hour 
too long, put it to my ear! 

The way off the platform was more difficult than the 
way on. I had come through one little door, but there 
were six of them exactly the same. At the conclusion of 
my speech, I bowed, walked rapidly to one of the doors, 
and found it would not budge 1 I returned again and 
bowed to the audience before trying another door. No, 
by heaven it wouldn’t open I Again I returned and bowed, 
and made another shot for a swing door. At the fourth 
try I went through. . . . That experience of doors that 
wouldn’t open became a nightmare of mine in American 
sleeping cars when I suffocated from overheated pipes. 

I have lectured a hundred times since then, made large 
numbers of speeches (sometimes as many as five a day) 
in American cities, faced every kind of audience from 
New York to San Francisco and across the Canadian 
border, in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and 
never conquered my nervousness, so that, if I am called 
upon for a speech at a public dinner in England, now, I 
suffer all the pangs of stage fright until I am well under 
way. But at least my experiences in the United States 
helped me to hide behind a calm and tranquil mask, and 
not to give myself away so utterly as that first time in 
Carnegie Hall. 

It was on my second visit, and at my opening lecture 
in the same great hall, that I obtained—by accident—the 
most wonderful ovation which will ever come to me in 
this life. It was my night out, as it were, most memo¬ 
rable, most astonising, most glorious. For it is a glorious 
sensation, whatever the cynic may say, to be lifted up on 
waves of enthusiasm, to have a great audience of intel¬ 
ligent people cheering one wildly, as though one’s words 
were magic. 

It was none of my doing. My words were poor com¬ 
monplace stuff, but I stood for something which the finest 

347 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

audience in New York liked with all their hearts that 
night—England, liberty, fair play—and against some¬ 
thing which that audience hated, disloyalty to the United 
States, discourtesy to England, foul play. 

It was the Sinn Feiners who did it. A friend of Ire¬ 
land, and advocate of Dominion Home Rule, I was one 
of the last men they should have attacked. But because 
I was an Englishman who dared to lecture before an 
American audience, they were determined to wreck my 
meeting, and make a savage demonstration. I was utterly 
unaware of this plot. I was not speaking on the subject 
of Ireland. I was talking about Austria, and was trying 
to tell an anecdote about an Austrian doctor—I never 
told it!—when from the middle gallery of the Carnegie 
Hall which was densely packed from floor to ceiling, 
there came a hoarse question in a stentorian voice with 
an Irish accent: don^t you take the marbles out 

of your mouth?^^ Rather staggered, and believing this 
to be a criticism of my vocal delivery and “English ac¬ 
cent,” I raised my voice, but it was instantly overwhelmed 
by an uproar of shouts, catcalls, whistlings, derisive 
laughter, abuse, and a wild wailing of women’s voices 
rising to a shriek. 

For a few moments I could not guess what all the 
trouble was about. I stood there, alone and motionless, 
on the platform, suddenly divorced from the audience, 
which I watched with a sense of profound curiosity. All 
sorts of strange things were happening. Men were going 
at each other with fists In the gallery, where there was a 
seething tumult. In the stalls I was aware of a very fat 
man In evening dress wedged tightly In his seat and 
bawling out something from an apoplectic face. Two 
other men tried to pull him out of his chair. In scattered 
groups In the stalls were ladles who seemed to be scream¬ 
ing at me. Other ladles seemed to be arguing with them, 
hushing them down. One lady struck another over the 

348 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

head with a fan. People were darting about the floor or 
watching the scrimmage up above. From the front row 
o^ the stalls friendly faces were staring up at me and 
giving me good counsel which I could not hear. 

Over and over again I tried to speak above the tumult. 
I carried on about that Austrian doctor, and then aban¬ 
doned him for another line of thought. I stuck it out for 
something like half an hour before there was comparative 
silence the police had come in and dragged out the most 
turbulent demonstrators—and then I continued my speech, 
interrupted frequently, but not overwhelmed. Every¬ 
thing I said was applauded tremendously. Some refer¬ 
ence I made to England’s place in the world brought the 
audience to its feet, cheering and cheering, waving hand¬ 
kerchiefs and fans, and when I finished, there was a surge 
up to the platform, and thousands of hands grasped mine, 
and generous, excited, splendid things were said which 
set my heart on fire. 

As I have said, it was not my doing, and it was not 
any eloquence of mine which stirred this enthusiasm. But 
that audience rose up to me because they were passionate 
to show how utterly they repudiated the things that had 
been said against England, how fiercely angry they were 
that a friendly visitor to the United States should be 
howled down like this in the heart of New York. Again 
it was my luck, and I was glad of it. 

It was not the last time I had to face hostile groups. 

I decided to give a lecture on the Irish situation in which 
I would tell the straight truth, fair to Ireland, fair to 
England. The Sinn Feiners rallied up again. The fairer 
I was to Ireland, the madder they became, while the 
other part of the audience cheered and cheered. In the 
midst of the commotion, a tall black figure jumped on to 
the platform. “Hullo I” I thought. “Here I die I” But 
it was a Catholic priest. Father Duffy, a famous chaplain 
of the American Army, who announced himself as an 

349 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Irish Republican, but pleaded that I should have a fair 
hearing. They just howled at him. However, by pa¬ 
tience and endurance I broke through the storm and 
said most of what I wanted to say. 

The next morning I was rung up on the telephone by 
an emotional lady. She had a great scheme, for which 
she desired my approval and collaboration. She had 
arranged to raise a bodyguard of stalwart society girls 
who would march to the hall with me, on the evening 
of my next lecture, and in heroic combat put to flight the 
Irish girls who were to parade with banners and insulting 
placards. ... I utterly refused to approve of the 
suggestion. 

My lecture agent, Mr. Lee Keedick, enjoyed those 
“Sinn Fein tea parties,” as they were called, with such 
enormous gusto, that there were some friendly souls who 
suggested that he had incited them for publicity pur¬ 
poses I But he missed the best, or the worst. In Chicago, 
on St. Patrick’s Eve, I was three-quarters of an hour 
before I could utter a single sentence. It was what the 
press called next morning a “near riot” and there were 
some Irish-American soldiers there, in' uniform, who 
fought like tigers before they were ejected by the police. 

For the first tiiiie in my life I had a police bodyguard 
wherever I went in Chicago. Two detectives insisted on 
driving in my taxicab, and they were both Irishmen, but, 
as one explained in a friendly manner, “It’s not your life 
we’re troubling about. Boss. It’s our reputation!” 

Boston, from Mr. Keedick’s point of view, was a dis¬ 
appointment. A great row was expected there, being the 
stronghold of the Sinn Fein cause, and when I appeared, 
behind the stage, there was a large force of police 
stripped for action. The police inspector came to my 
dressing room, and demanded permission to precede me 
on the stage and announce to the audience that if there 
was any demonstration he would put his men on to them. 

350 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I refused to give that permission. It seemed to me the 
wrong kind of introduction for an Englishman to an 
American audience. As a matter of fact, they behaved 
like lambs, in the best tradition of Boston, and I was 
quite disconcerted by their silence, having become used 
to the other kind of thing which I found exhilarating. 

Stranger things happen to an English lecturer in the 
United States than in any other country. At least they 
happened to me. I shall never forget, for instance, how 
in the middle of a speech to the City Club of New York, 
I was thrust into a taxicab, hurried off to the 44th Street 
theater, received with a tremendous explosion (a flash¬ 
light photo!) in the dressing room of A 1 Jolson, the 
funny man, thrust into the middle of a harem scene 
(scores of beautiful maidens) and told to make a speech 
on behalf of wounded soldiers while the audience raffled 
for an original letter from Lloyd George to the Amer¬ 
ican nation. 

Surprised by my rapid transmigration from the City 
Club, and by my presence in an Oriental harem, very hot, 
rather flustered, and not knowing what to do with my 
hands, I kept screwing up a bit of paper which had been 
given to me at the wings, and by the time I had finished my 
three-minutes’ speech it was a bit of wet, mushy pulp. 
When I left the stage, a white-faced man in the wings 
who had been making frantic signs to me, informed me 
coldly that I had utterly destroyed Lloyd George’s letter 
to the American nation which had just been raffled for 
many hundreds of dollars. . . . After that I went back 
to finish my speech at the City Club. 


XXVI 


W HEN I first visited the United States in 1919, 
the whole nation was seething with a conflict of 
opinion between pro-Wilsonites and anti-Wilsonites. 

It was not a mere academic controversy which people 
could discuss hotly but without passion. It divided fami¬ 
lies. It caused quarrels among lifelong friends. The 
mere mention of the name of Wilson spoilt the amenities 
of any dinner party and transformed it into a political 
meeting. 

In my first article for The New York Timesy record¬ 
ing my impressions of America, I slipped out the phrase 
that “I was all for Wilson.” I received, without exag¬ 
geration, hundreds of letters from all parts of the United 
States, “putting me wise” to the thousand and one 
reasons why Wilson’s doings in Paris would be utterly re¬ 
pudiated by the Senate and people. He had violated the 
Constitution. He had acted without authority. He had 
tried to commit the United States to his scheme of the 
League of Nations against their convictions and consent. 
On the other hand, there were many people who still 
regarded him as the greatest leader in the world and the 
noblest idealist. 

Ignorant, like most Englishmen, of the parties and per¬ 
sonalities of American politics, at that time, I kept my 
ears open to all this, but couldn’t avoid falling into pit- 
falls. I made a delightful “gaffe,” as the French would 
say, by turning to one gentleman in the Union Club 
before he acted as my chairman to the lecture I was 
giving there, and asked him to tell me something of 
Wilson’s character and history. It was Mr. Charles 

352 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Hughes, ex-governor of New York, and defeated can¬ 
didate for the Presidency against Wilson himself. 

It was the last question which I ought to have asked, 
as people explained to me later. But I shall never forget 
the fine and thoughtful way in which Mr. Hughes an¬ 
swered my question and the subtlety with which he ana¬ 
lyzed Wilson’s character, without a touch of personal 
animosity or a trace of meanness. I was aware that I was 
in the presence of a great intellect, and a great gentleman. 

I had the opportunity of talking to Mr. Hughes in each 
of my three visits, and when he was Secretary of Foreign 
Affairs in Washington, and each time I was more im¬ 
pressed with the conviction that he was likely to become 
one of the greatest statesmen of the world, and, unlike 
many great statesmen, had a fine and delicate sense of 
honor, and a desire for the well-being, not only of the 
United States but of the human race. 

Between my first and second visits Wilson’s tragedy 
had happened, and the United States had refused to 
enter the League of Nations. The Republican party had 
swept the country, inspired by general disgust and dis¬ 
illusionment with the Peace of Versailles, by a tidal wave 
of public opinion against any administration which would 
involve the United States in the jungle of Europe’s racial 
passions, and by a general desire to be rid of a govern¬ 
ment associated with all the restrictions, orders, annoy¬ 
ances, petty injustice, extravagance, and fever of the War 
regime. As a friend of mine said, the question put to the 
electors was not “Are you in favor of the League of 
Nations?” but “Are you sick and tired of the present 
administration?” And the answer was, “By God, we 
are I” 

President Harding reigned in place of President Wil¬ 
son. Owing to the kindness of a brilliant American jour¬ 
nalist named Lowell Mellett who had acted for a time 
correspondent on the Western front, and who 

353 


as war 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

seemed to have the liberty of the White House, the 
Senate, Congress, and every office, drawing-room, and 
assembly at Washington, I was received by the President, 
and had a little conversation with him which ended in a 
message to the British people through The Review of 
Reviews, of which I had become editor. It was a mes¬ 
sage of affection and esteem for the nation which, he 
said, all Americans of the old stock regarded still as 
the Mother Country—a generous and almost dangerous 
thing to be said by a President of the United States. 

A tall, heavy, handsome man, with white hair and 
ruddy face, the new President seemed to me kind-hearted, 
honest and well-meaning, without any great gifts of 
genius or leadership, and a little timid of the enormous 
responsibility that had come to him. A year later I saw 
him again, and had the honor of introducing my son Tony. 
He was surprised that I had a son of that height and 
age, and it reminded him instantly of an anecdote refer- 
' ring to Chief Justice White and a little lawyer who intro¬ 
duced a tall, husky son to him. “Ah,” said the Chief 
Justice, “a block of the old chip, I see!” 

It was due to my friend Mellett again that I had the 
opportunity, and very extraordinary honor, for a foreign 
journalist, of giving evidence before the House Com¬ 
mittee on Naval Disarmament. It was a Committee 
appointed to report on the possibility of calling the 
Washington Conference. I was summoned to give evi¬ 
dence in the House of Congress without any time to pre¬ 
pare notes or a speech, and when I took my place like a 
mouse in a hole in the center of a horseshoe of raised 
seats occupied by about twenty-five members of the Com¬ 
mittee, I was in a state of high tension which I masked 
by a supreme effort of nerve control. For I was, to some 
extent, speaking not only on behalf of Great Britain, and 
taking upon myself the responsibility of expressing the 
views of my own people, but on behalf of all idealists in 

354 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

all nations who looked to the United States for leadership 
in the way of international peace. I knew that I must be 
right in my facts and figures, that I must say nothing 
that could give offense to the United States, and nothing 
that would seem like disloyalty to England, while telling 
the truth, as far as I knew it, without reserve, regarding 
England’s naval and military burdens, the dangers exist¬ 
ing in Europe, and the sentiment of the British people. 

After a preliminary statement lasting ten minutes or so, 
to which the Committee listened in absolute silence, I 
was closely and shrewdly cross-examined by various mem¬ 
bers, and had to answer very difficult and searching ques¬ 
tions. It was one of my lucky mornings. I came through 
the ordeal better than I could have hoped. I was warmly 
congratulated afterward by members of the British Em¬ 
bassy who told me I had said the right things, and I 
honestly believe I did a tiny bit of good to England and the 
world that day. The New York Times and other papers 
published my address verbatim and it went on to the rec¬ 
ords of Congress. Anyhow, it did no harm, and I was 
thankful enough for that. 

My lectures on the second visit had nothing to do 
with the War, except in its effects, and I spoke entirely 
on the subject of European conditions, always with a 
strong plea to the United States to come in boldly and 
throw her moral and economic influence on the side of, 
international peace and reconstruction. From the very 
first I took the line, which I held with absolute conviction, 
that Germany would be unable, after the exhaustion of 
war, to pay the enormous indemnities demanded by the 
Peace of Versailles, and that if Germany were thrust 
into the mire and went the way of Austria, Europe would 
not recover from financial ruin. At the same time I 
pointed out the rights and justice of France, and gave her 
view fairly and generously, as I was bound to do, because 
of my illimitable admiration of French heroism, my 

355 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

enormous pity for French sacrifice, my certain knowledge 
of French danger. My argument was for economic co¬ 
operation between the peoples of Europe, as the only 
means of saving that civilization, with demobilization 
of hatreds as well as armies, and a new brotherhood of 
peoples after the agony and folly of the war. 

I I risked my popularity with the American people in 
making speeches like that. I could have got easy applause 
by calling upon the old god of vengeance against the Ger¬ 
mans for at that time in the United States there was less 
forgiveness than in England for all the evil and suffering 
caused by Germany, less tolerance of “pacifists,” as much 
brutality in the average mob. But though I aroused some 
suspicion, some hostility, on the whole American audiences 
listened to my argument with wonderful enthusiasm and 
generosity. 

I saw a distinct change of opinion after my first visit 
(I am not pretending that I had anything to do with it), 
in favor of closer friendship with Great Britain, and 
economic co-operation with Europe. In every city to 
which I went I found at least two or three thousand 
people according to the size of my place of lecture, quickly 
and ardently responsive to the idea that America and 
Great Britain, acting together, might lift the world out 
of its ruined state and lead civilization to a higher plane. 
In city clubs, women’s clubs, private dinner parties, draw¬ 
ing-room meetings, I found great numbers of people des¬ 
perately anxious about the responsibility of the United 
States toward European nations, eager to do the right 
thing though doubtful what to do, poignantly desirous 
of getting some lead higher than that of self-interest 
(though not conflicting with it), and with a generous 
warm-hearted sympathy for the British folk. Doubtless 
these groups were insignificant in numbers to the mass of 
citizens with whom I never came in touch, among whom 
there was an old strain of suspicion and hostility to Eng- 

356 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

land, and all sorts of currents of prejudice, ill will, hatred, 
even, among Irish, German, and foreign stocks, in addi¬ 
tion to the narrow nationalism, the vulgar selfishness of 
many others. That is true, but the people I met, and 
to whom I lectured, were the intelligentsia, the leaders of 
social life, and business life, the wives, mothers, and 
daughters of the “leading citizens,” the arbiters and, to 
some extent, the creators of public opinion. Their hopes, 
ideals, visions, must, sooner or later, be reflected in na¬ 
tional tendencies and acts. Only blind observers would 
now say that the United States has not revealed in recent 
acts and influence that broadening of outlook which I 
perceived at work below the surface in 1921, and did 
something, perhaps—not much—to help, by a simple and 
truthful report of facts from this side of the world. 

In the United States I had, strange as it may seem, a 
certain authority as an economic expert! This may sur¬ 
prise my intimate friends, and most of all my wife, who 
knows that I have never been able to count my change, 
that I have not as much head for figures as a new-born 
lamb, and that I have never succeeded in making out a 
list of expenses for journalistic work without gross errors 
which have put me abominably out of pocket. Yet many 
of the greatest financiers in the United States—men like 
the brothers Warburg, and Mr. Mitchell of the National 
City Bank—invited me to address them on the economic 
situation in Europe, and agreed with my arguments and 
conclusions. I remember one dinner at which I expounded 
my views on that subject to no less than sixty of the lead- 
>ving financial experts in New York, afterward being sub¬ 
jected to a fire of questions which, to my own amazement, 
I was able to answer. The truth is, as I quickly perceived, 
that a few very simple laws underlie the whole compli¬ 
cated system of international trade and finance. As long 
as one held on to those laws, which I did, like grim death, 
one could not go wrong in one’s analysis of the European 

357 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

situation, and all facts and figures adjusted themselves to 
these elementary principles. 

Money, for example, is only a symbol for the reality 
of values behind it—in grain, cattle, mineral wealth, labor 
and credit. 

When paper money is issued in advance of a nation’s 
real values, it is merely a promissory note on future in¬ 
dustry and production. 

France, Germany, and most European nations were 
issuing vast quantities of these promissory notes which 
were not supported, for the most part, by actual wealth. 

The prosperity of a country like Germany increased 
the prosperity of all other countries. Its poverty would 
lead to less prosperity in all other countries. 

Commercial prosperity depends upon the interchange 
of goods between one country and another, and not upon 
the possession of money tokens. And so on. 

By keeping these facts firmly in my mind, I was able 
to keep a straight line of common sense in the wild laby¬ 
rinth of our European problems. But I had also seen 
the actual life and conditions of many countries of 
Europe, and could tell what I had seen in a simple, 
straight way to the business men of the United States. 
It was what they wanted to know, beyond all other 
things, and I think they believed my accounts more than 
those of more important men, because I was not a Gov¬ 
ernment official, or propagandist, but a simple reporter, 
without an ax to grind, and an eyewitness of the condi¬ 
tions I described. 

Among the men who asked me to tell them a few 
things they wanted to know, or the things they knew 
(better than I did) but wanted to discuss, was Mr. 
Herbert Hoover, for whom I have the deepest admira¬ 
tion and respect, like all who have met him. He came 
into my room at the Lotus Club one day, unannounced 
except for a tap at the door by his friend and assistant, 

358 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

Barr Baker. I had just returned from a journey, and 
my room was littered with shirts, socks, collars, and the 
contents of my bags. He paid no heed to all that but sat 
back in an arm chair and after some questions, talked 
gravely of world affairs. I need not record here that 
conversation I had with him—the gist of it is in my book 
of American impressions, “People of Destiny,” but I was 
glad and proud to sit in the presence of a man—so simple, 
so frank, so utterly truthful—who organized the greatest 
work of rescue for suffering humanity ever achieved in 
the history of the world—the American Relief Adminis¬ 
tration. But for that work, many millions of men, 
women, and children in the nations most stricken by war 
would have died of starvation, and Europe would have 
been swept from end to end by the scourge of pestilence 
which follows famine. 

I seem to have been bragging a little in what I have 
lately written, making myself out to be an important per¬ 
son, with unusual gifts. That is not my intention, or my 
idea. The fact is that the people of the United States 
give any visitor who arrives with decent credentials a 
sense of importance, and elevate him for^a while above 
his usual state of insignificance. They herald him with 
an exaggeration of his virtues, his achievements, his 
reputation. Any goose is made to believe himself a 
stately swan, by the warmth of courtesy shown toward 
him, by the boosting of his publicity agent, and by the 
genuine desire of American citizens to make a guest “feel 
good” with himself. 

This has a strange and exhilarating effect upon the 
visitor. It gives him self-confidence. It actually does 
develop virtues in him. His goose quills actually change 
into something like swansdown, and his neck distinctly 
elongates. There is something in the very atmosphere 
of New York—electric, sparkling, a little intoxicating— 
which gives a man courage, makes him feel bigger, and 

359 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

not only feel bigger, but be bigger I This is no fantasy, 
but actual fact. In the United States I was a more dis¬ 
tinguished person that ever I could be in England. I 
spoke more boldly than ever I could in England. I was 
rather a brave fellow for those few weeks each year, 
because so many people believed in my quality of char¬ 
acter, in my intelligence, in my powers of truth-telling, 
whereas in England no one believes in anybody. 

So I do not boast or preen myself at all when I write 
about the wonderful times I have had in the United 
States. It happens to everybody who does not go out 
of his way (or hers) as some do, to insult a great-hearted 
people, to put on “side” in American drawing-rooms, to 
say with an air of superiority “We don’t do that in Eng¬ 
land, you know!” 

I visited many American colleges, and with solemn 
ceremony was initiated into the sacred brotherhood of a 
Greek letter society which is the highest honor than can 
be given to a foreign visitor by the youth of America. 

In Canada—at Winnipeg—I was made a Veteran of 
the Great War by a gathering of old soldiers. 

At Salt Lake City I lectured to 6,000 Mormons—most 
moral and admirable people—in their Tabernacle, and 
was received on the platform by a Hallelujah Chorus 
from sixty Mormon maidens. 

In Detroit, where I began my first speech of the day 
at 9.30 in the morning, I spoke down a funnel on the 
subject of the Russian Famine, which was “broadcast” 
to millions of people late that night. 

I traveled thousands of miles, and in every smoking 
carriage talked with groups of men who told me thou¬ 
sands of anecdotes and put me wise to every aspect of 
American life from the inside. 

I was entertained at luncheon, dinner, and supper by 
the “leading citizens” of scores of cities, and made friends 
with numbers of charming, courteous, cultured people. 

360 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I was interviewed by battalions of reporters who re¬ 
ceived me as a brother of their craft, and never once let 
me down by putting into my mouth words I did not wish 
to say. They were mostly young college men and, though 
I hate to say it, a keener, better-educated crowd, on 
the whole, than the average of their kind in English 
journalism. 

I will record only one more of the wonderful things 
that happened to me as a representative of English jour¬ 
nalism in New York. 

On the eve of my departure, after my second visit, a 
dinner was given in my honor at the Biltmore. It was 
organized by Mrs. MacVickar, who has the organizing 
genius of a lady Napoleon, and a committee of ladies, 
and a thousand people were there. They included all the 
most distinguished people in New York, many of the 
most distinguished in America, and they were there to 
testify their friendship to England. They were there also 
to express their friendship, if I may dare say so, to me, as 
a man who had tried to serve England, and America, too, 
in speaking, and in writing, the simple truth. They wrote 
all their names in a book that was given to me at the 
dinner, and I keep it as a great treasure, holding the 
token of a nation’s kindness. 

What added a little sauce piquante to the proceedings 
was the delivery from time to time during the dinner of 
notes from Sinn Feins parading outside the hotel. The 
first message I read was not flattering. “You are a dirty 
English rat. You ought to be deported.” Another in¬ 
formed me that I was a paid agent of the British Govern¬ 
ment. Another was a general indictment informing all 
American citizens that it was a disgrace to dine with me, 
and an act of treachery to their own nation. Another 
little missive described me as a typical blackguard in a 
nation of cutthroats. So they followed each other to the 
high table, where I was the guest of honor. . . . 

361 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

I had a great time in the United States on each of my 
three visits, but notwithstanding all I have said, I shall 
never make another lecture tour in that country. The 
fatigue of it demands the physique of an Arctic explorer 
combined with that of an African lion tamer. Several 
times I nearly succumbed to tinned tomato soup. Twice 
did I lose my voice in a wind forty below zero, and regain 
it by doses of medicine which destroyed my digestive 
organs. Nightly was I roasted alive in sleeping berths. 
Daily did my head swell to unusual proportions, not in 
conceit, but in a central heating system which is a terror 
to Englishmen. Visibly did I wither away as I traveled 
from city to city, received by deputations of leading citizens 
on arrival, after a sleep-disturbed night, with the duty 
ahead of keeping bright and intelligent through a long 
day’s programme, saying the right thing to the gracious 
ladies who entertained me at lunch, the bright thing to 
the City Club which entertained me to dinner, the true 
thing to all the questions asked about Europe, England, 
Lloyd George, Prohibition, Mrs. Asquith, the American 
flapper, Bolshevism, France, and the biological necessity 
of war, to business men, professors, journalists, poets, 
financiers, bishops, society leaders in Kansas City, or 
Grand Rapids, the President of the Mormon church, the 
editors of the local newspapers, the organizers of my 
lecture that evening, and the unknown visitors who called 
on me at the hotel all through the day, and every day. 

One can’t keep that sort of thing up. It’s wearing. . . . 

I remember that in the Copley Plaza Hotel at Boston, 
a little old gentleman carrying a black bag tapped at my 
door and introduced himself by the name of Doctor 
Gibbs. He said that his hobby in life was to search out 
Gibbs in the United States, and he found thousands I He 
presented me with a copy of the Gibbs Family Bulletin, 
and opening his black bag produced a photograph of his 
great-grandfather. 


362 


ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM 

It was my son Tony who called my attention to the 
fact that I was amazingly like that venerable man, who 
was toothless (he lived before the era of American dentis¬ 
try) and with hair that had worn thin as the sere and 
yellow leaf. I decided that I should become exactly like 
him, “sans hair, sans teeth,” if I continued this career 
as an English lecturer in America. In order to avoid 
premature old age, I made a resolve (which I shall prob¬ 
ably break) not to make another lecture tour in the 
United States. 

But of all my journalistic adventures, I count these 
American experiences as my most splendid time, and for 
the American people I have a deep gratitude and affec¬ 
tion. I can only try to repay their kindness by using my 
pen whenever possible to increase the friendship between 
our countries, to kill prejudice and slander, and to advo¬ 
cate that unwritten alliance between our two peoples 
which I believe will one day secure the peace of the world. 


THE END 


363 


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New Books for Boys 


JIM SPURLING MILLMAN By Albert W. Tolman 

The second in Mr. Tolman’s splendid series which began with Jim Spurling 
Fisherman. Jim is now a college freshman; with a group of college cronies 
he undertakes to make a little money during the summer, running a small 
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CATTY ATKINS, SAILORMAN 

By Clarence Budington Kelland 

Catty and his boon companion, Wee-wee Moore, go adventuring on the 
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THE BOY EXPLORERS IN DARKEST NEW GUINEA 

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THE KIDNAPPED CAMPERS ON THE ROAD 

By Flavia A. C. Canfield 

Here again are Archie and Edward, whose adventures you enjoyed in 
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thrilling experience as they travel west in Uncle Weary’s big camping van. 


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ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND 

Peter Newell Edition 

Of course, you want this universally loved story for your children, and 
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THE KIDNAPPED CAMPERS ON THE ROAD 

By Flavia A. C. Canfield 

Here again are Archie and Edward, whose adventures so many children 
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DEEDS OF HEROISM AND BRAVERY 

Edited by Elwyn A. Barron 

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